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U.S. Immigration Officers of Mexican Ancestry as Mexican Americans, Citizens, and

Immigration PoliceAuthor(s): Josiah McC. HeymanSource: Current Anthropology, Vol. 43, No. 3 (June 2002), pp. 479-507Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for AnthropologicalResearch

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479

C u r r e n t A n t h r o p o l o g y Volume 43, Number 3, June 2002 2002 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2002/4303-0005$3.00

U.S. ImmigrationOfficers of MexicanAncestry as MexicanAmericans, Citizens,and ImmigrationPolice1

by Josiah McC. Heyman

U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) officers ofMexican ancestry do not identify with Mexican and other LatinAmerican immigrants. Instead, they understand themselves asU.S. citizens who reject both domestic racism and ethnic loyal-ties that cross national borders. Their self-understandings emergefrom processes that include U.S. citizenship ideology and socialmobility into primary-labor-market jobs with stability, benefits,and progressive careers. These processes insulate them from theexperience of immigrants in casual and insecure labor marketsdevoid of social benefits. Thus they differ from immigrants notonly in being on opposite sides of the bureaucratic encounter butalso in being at opposite poles of bureaucratized social citizen-ship. This suggests that a cause of opposition to immigration inadvanced capitalist societies is that citizenship-based job andbenefit systems restrict the scope of empathy.

j o s i a h m c c . h e y m a n is Professor of Anthropology at Mich-igan Technological University (1400 Townsend Dr., Houghton,Mich. 49931-1295, U.S.A. [[email protected]]). Born in 1958,he was educated at The Johns Hopkins University (B.A., 1980)and The City University of New York (Ph.D., 1988). Hispublications include Life and Labor on the Border (Tucson: Uni-versity of Arizona Press, 1991), Finding a Moral Heart for U.S.Immigration Policy: An Anthropological Perspective (Washing-ton, D.C.: American Anthropological Association, 1998), and theedited volume States and Illegal Practices (Oxford: Berg, 1999).The present paper was submitted 1 ix 99 and accepted 11 x 01.

1. This paper was originally presented at the 1994 meetings of theAmerican Anthropological Association, in a session under the aus-pices of the Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologistschaired by Norma Gonzalez. Over the years, the paper has receivedvarious helpful commentaries and reviews. I appreciate all this gen-erous scholarly help. Above all, I thank my informants inside andoutside the INS, who cannot be named. Research on the INS wassupported by grants from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundationand the Wenner-Gren Foundation for AnthropologicalResearch. Allresponsibility for errors of fact or interpretation remains my own.

About one-third of the U.S. Immigration and Naturali-zation Service (INS) officers working at the Mexico-United States border are of Mexican ancestry. Althoughthere is no universally accepted ethnic term for them, Iwill call them Mexican Americans.2 Their job requiresthem to question and sometimes arrest or turn away

people from Mexico and Central America. How do theyunderstand and justify their work? They might envisionthemselves as sharing an origin with fellow Latinos andpossibly a common fate that spans borders. All but oneof the 33 officers interviewed had grown up close to theborder or in a heavy migration area of a border state.Most of them were generationally not far removed fromimmigration to the United States, and most had parentswho held working-class jobs, in this region largely filledby Mexican immigrants. Mexican Americans histori-cally have been treated as a separate race in this region,blurring the line between them and people in Mexico.Thus, cross-national ethnic solidarity is a meaningfuloption. Alternatively, they might envision themselvesas U.S. citizens whose fate diverges from that of recentmigrants. They might assert their ethnic identity asMexican Americans or deny the relevance of that eth-nicity, but in either case they would not have to assumecommonality with noncitizens. In fact, these officersvary on the question of ethnicity, but with striking con-sistency they emphasize their standing as U.S. citizens,with specific rights to jobs and public distributions. Theyare sharply critical of illegal (undocumented) migrantsand generally skeptical about recent legal immigrants aswell. While they sometimes discuss migrants with sym-pathy from above, stressing the poverty in Mexico andthe need for people to find work in the United States,

they criticize them for welfare dependence and poorwork skills, again involving value judgments from above.In neither sympathy nor criticism do they view migrantsas equalsas sharing a path through life.

This article addresses limitations on expressed em-pathy in situations of differential citizenship. In strati-fied (and perhaps all) situations, people envision them-selves and others as members of recognized (though notexclusive) sets. The reigning anthropological wisdom, es-pecially well-developed for ethnicity, is that group cat-egorization is fluid and situational (Barth 1969, Vincent1974) and groups largely a question of identity. I have noproblem with the notions of situationality and fluidity;as we shall see, the position of Mexican Americans in

2. When doing interviews and observations, I used the term His-panic so as not to put anyone on the spot, and my informantsreplied with this label and often volunteered it themselves. His-panic is too vague, however, to convey the important fact thatthey are all of Mexican ancestry and are arresting or otherwisecontrolling current Mexican immigrants. Mexican American,along with its alternative Chicano, has particular political andgenerational connotations in the U.S.-Mexican community withwhich some officers might not agree. Latino, a more currentterm, has the same encompassing meaning as Hispanic (it doesnot distinguish people of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Domin-ican, etc., backgrounds), and I use it in cases where common LatinAmerican origin is salient. Anglo (short for Anglo-American) isused for all U.S. citizen whites, following usage in the borderlands.

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480 F c u r r e n t a n t h r o p o l o g y Volume 43, Number 3, June 2002

the U.S. West has changed, though quite incompletely.However, a focus on identity begs important ques-tions. First, seeing identity as artificial and constructed,it concentrates on the words and ideas involved in grouplabels. While relevant, this treats identity as if it were akind of magical hat that people put on and then becomethat kind of hat. It does not examine how social andeconomic processes penetrate lives and motivate groupidentification. Second, it assumes a rather simple de-velopment of opposition to nonmembers. Perhaps thevery fact of discoursethe choice of one word to rec-ognize an identityforces contrast and conflict withother identities, but I suggest that the substantive pow-ers, privileges, and institutions involved with identityalso matter. Citizens rights and benefits shape their ex-periences and contemporary life-worlds. Lived contextsand formal ideologies affect interior motivations,3 in-volving understandings of others and emotional statestoward them. Citizenship privileges render the imagi-nation less able to envision other, unprivileged ways oflife and hence less likely to empathize with them. Suchmotivations support the daily work of enforcing distinc-tions and sustain the broader citizenship politics jus-tifying and promoting this work. By making explicit con-

3. There are serious problems with attempting to describe mentalprocesses but strong reasons not to be deterred. Claudia Strauss(1992) recognizes that peoples statements are often inconsistentwith their mental states or behavior, but she argues that to un-derstand culturally meaningful action we need to explore howshared cultural models are linked with motivation. To get at suchmotivation she combines cognition (as I do in discussing officersimagination about immigrants) and affect (as I do in discussingempathy), suggesting that motivation emerges when emotionallycharged life experience intersects with stock cultural patterns. My

arguments about citizenship invoke just such issues, so I need tomake inferences about mental states from outward expressionsandactions. My field observations on the INS indicated consistencybetween expression and action involving the two stances I diagnosein the interviews: paternalistic sympathy with poor migrants andcoldness toward perceived illegitimate claimants to citizenshipprivileges. When laws could be effectively enforced, they were en-forced strictly either with tact and kindness directed at perceivedpoor and peaceable outsiders or with cold aggressiveness directedat individuals perceived as bearers of danger and immorality. Anybending of the rules was justified in terms of a heavy caseload andweak evidence (that is, unenforceability) rather than a desire tohelp people with familiar problems (Heyman 2001a:13133). Fur-thermore, I have tried to make clear that I am talking about ex-

pressed empathy and moral imagination. To do this, I have paidmost attention to subtle statements that perhaps best express men-tal states, suchas the use of pronouns, passingstatements ofknowl-

edge of or concern with the daily life of immigrants or their absence,recollections of concrete events and circumstances (especially onesthat informants considered meaningful), and so forth. I have notignored more formal rhetoric, but I have tried not to rely on it, forits relation to consciousness is problematic (I view it more as ev-idence of the way in which people fuse affective states with publiclysupplied ideologies). Interviews were relatively frank, and peoplespoke openly about other disparities between their formal roles asINS officers and their expressed thoughts about the border regionand immigration (Heyman 1995a:27577). Interviewees weremostly motivated to present themselves as being sympathetic toimmigrantsin order to show me that INS officers were not brutes,which they feared was their public imageand therefore, if any-thing, the expressions should be more empathetic or sympatheticthan the total pattern of thinking.

nections between levels usually obscured in the termidentity, I seek to link the global distribution of un-equal life chances (which are substantially affected bycitizenship rights and redistributions), the explicit pol-itics and ideologies of citizenship identity, and the in-ward experience of being a citizen. The instance ofMexican American INS officers has all these elements:successful historical struggles, both collective and per-sonal, for U.S. citizenship rights and benefits, expressedstatements of imaginative sympathy and rejection basedon the substance of citizenship, and a key role in theday-to-day tasks of governing a world-systemic flow ofmigration. Citizenshipis powerful. What, then, accountsfor its persuasive force?

The citizen-immigrant distinction has been the sub-ject of two recent anthropological essays. Verena Stolcke(1995) examines the political rhetoric of immigration ex-clusion in Western Europe, finding a shift from racismto claims of cultural purity that she terms cultural fun-damentalism. Aihwa Ong (1996) sees the U.S. white-black racial dichotomy as shaping the citizen-immigrantdistinction and distinctions among new immigrants.There is much to be learned from both articles (bothcultural fundamentalism and racialized lifestyle con-cepts sometimes surface in INS officer thinking), but bydisplacing the topic to culture or race they skirt citizen-ship per se. Yet citizenship more than suffices as a dis-tinction for most Mexican American INS officers, whoas a result of their historical situation as a discriminated-against minority in the United States are less likely thanother officers to indulge in racist or cultural-fundamen-talist rhetorics of immigration exclusion.

Citizenship is membership in a political collectivity,involving duties (such as military service), rights (suchas not being subject to deportation), and claims to re-distributed resources (such as old-age benefits). The col-lectivity varies, from cities and local districts throughnation-states to transnational organizations. My imme-diate focus is nation-state citizenship, but eventually Ishall bring lessons from the present study to bear onother scales of collectivity. One approach to the studyof citizenship emphasizes official definitions and stat-uses (Soysal 1994, McNeely 1998). Such formaliststudies, though necessary, pay little attention to howpeople identify with and act on their citizenship. Thisarticle takes a more substantive approach (HolstonandAppadurai 1996:190) in two ways: it concerns itself with

the content of citizenship rights, and it asks whether andhow such content matters in peoples ideas and actionstoward noncitizens.

As for the content of the lived experience of citizen-ship, I tend to be inclusive. I consider the U.S. federalcivil service jobs which INS officers hold and which arerestricted to citizens as the way in which they experienceprimary labor markets and job-allocated benefits such ashealth care. These labor markets and benefits are notformally part of nation-state citizenship, but in practicethey have developed together historically and are im-portant ways in which citizens distinguish themselvesfrom noncitizens. Distinctive national political arrange-



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h e y m a n Immigration Officers of Mexican AncestryF 481

mentscitizenship in the formal sensebind a web ofrights and redistributive claims across many legal andinstitutional terrains, and the individual experiencesthisweb as a whole life-world. Robert Alvarez (1987) foundthat the naturalization (conversion to U.S. citizenship)of Mexican immigrants was the holistic outcome ofmany experiences, such as established jobs and a rela-tively high standard of living, played out across personalhistory. This enveloping, life-long accretion of ideas andpractices can be termed the citizenship process (also seeOng 1996), and it affects people born as citizens as wellas those choosing to naturalize. Enduring and multifac-eted, this process offers elements for citizens cognitiveand emotional imagination of noncitizens. The presenttask of citizenship theory is how to join elements notusually connected: theories of immigration politics andtheories of the historical development of citizen life-worlds.

Existing citizenship theory has two main emphases.The internalist explores the historical creation ofrights and duties within polities, while the externalistaddresses the relations between citizens and outsiders.At stake is not the distinction itself but the understand-ing to be gained by bringing the two together. T. H. Mar-shall (1950) established the internalist agenda by delin-eating three types of citizenship rights in the nation-state: civil (the integrity of the person and rights beforethe law), political (rights to participate in voting, politicalassociation, etc.) and social (claims on resources redis-tributed by the state). He pointed out that nationallyaccorded rights modify the market-determined distrib-utive outcomes of capitalism. His schematic model ofcitizenship history is subject to considerable debate (seeB. Turner 1986, 1990; Barbalet 1988; Mann 1988), but ithas given rise to a shared understanding of the internalfeatures of citizenship. First, rising states consolidatedpower by negotiating obligations from and concessionsto their populaces, in the process creating national cit-izens (Tilly 1996). Since then, paying taxes and servingin the military or other power-wielding arms of the statehave been key citizenship experiences. National ideol-ogies are inculcated by patriotic citizenship education inschools (Shklar 1991). Second, expanded citizenshiprights were an elite sop to the less privileged in the con-text of bitter struggles in the course of developing cap-italism (besides the Barbalet, Turner, and Mann citationsabove, see Hanagan and Tilly 1999). Political struggle in

national arenas promotes citizenship because it dis-penses with the privileges of old social orders withoutmaking specific class-based concessions. In this way, cit-izenship paradoxically becomes an open and egalitarian(to insiders) form of stratification (with regard to outsid-ers). Finally, citizenship develops in close coordinationwith the complex institutionalization of capitalism.

Both in capitalisms early history and in regions of theworld system outside the core, one witnesses a fairlyclose approximation to the pure Marxist model of laborand capital. However, as capitalist production andexchange expand, firms and governments take on some-what stable segmented patterns, especially in core

nations. Within the labor market, a primary markethas bureaucratic qualities such as credentialized quali-fications, job rights with some degree of security, anddefinite career ladders. Jobs in this market often providecontractually or governmentally mandated redistribu-tive benefits, such as health insurance and pension plans.Education, often required by these jobs, becomes an im-portant form of governmental redistribution. INS jobsare part of this market. At the same time, an increasinglydifferentiated capitalism relegates other workers to thesecondary labor market, in which jobs are unstable, donot offer an ascending career path, often lack benefits(e.g., do not have health insurance), render people badcredit risks, and are poorly linked to the educational sys-tem (Gordon, Edwards, and Reich 1982). These hazardsface new Mexican and Central American immigrants. Ina strictly legal sense, labor market placement is not iden-tical to citizenship status, but in a socially meaningfulsense, primary-market jobs and internal citizenshiparose at the same time through the same struggles, sup-port each others functioning, privilege the same set ofworkers and households, and merge in lived experience.

Externalist theory addresses what Alexander Aleini-koff (1997) terms circles of membership, the rights andduties of citizens (ascribed and naturalized), permanentand temporary residents, and undocumented entrants. Itviews the political legacies of nation-formation as shap-ing the treatment of immigrants (Brubaker 1989, 1992;Hollifield 1994), and it recognizes that citizenship statusfosters anti-immigrant mobilization (hence the termcitizenship politics) (see Stolcke 1995:1112 and es-pecially T. Turner [1995]). Although citizen/noncitizenis an important distinction, we cannot take for grantedas the immigration politics literature often doesthatcitizens will perceive themselves to have different stand-ing and interests from noncitizens. The internalist per-spective helps clarify how the citizen resolution ofclass struggles might divide those who already haverights from those who have yet to gain them. For ex-ample, Maurer (1997) shows how British Virgin Islandslocals arrived at a belonger/immigrant distinctionafter a unifying, class-oriented labor movement declinedand civil service jobs became available to belongersonly. The point is that citizens perceive and act towardnoncitizens on the basis of ideas of membership derivedfrom past political struggles and deformations of purecapitalism, connected to rights and claims delivered by

current status.Cases illustrating the internal/external dynamic arenot easy to find because many situations combine eth-nicity and nationality, precluding identification of theelements specific to citizenship (Brubaker 1989, Cor-nelius, Hollifield, and Martin 1994). Germany, for ex-ample, until 1999 made citizenship difficult to obtain forpersons not of German ethnicity. This ethnicized cit-izenship is not readily comparable to the nonethnicizedcitizenship held by INS officers of Mexican ancestry. Thesituation in France, in contrast, substantially parallelsthe U.S. case. A recipient of considerable immigrationfrom the 19th century on, France gradually shed its Gal-



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lic-ancestry-defined membership in favor of nonethni-cized citizenship by making citizens all those bornwithin French boundaries whatever their origins. Theinternalist history of French citizenship (Brubaker 1992,Hollifield 1994, Noiriel 1996) shows this pattern to comefrom the synthesis of central state building (such as pub-lic education and military service) and radical social de-mands, often coming from immigrants themselves, forpublic benefits and primary-labor-market structures.France continues to receive immigrants, in recent dec-ades heavily from North and West Africa, and is nowundergoing struggles over immigration restriction andredefining citizenship with regard to the latitude for cul-tural variation. In the literature on the French case, how-ever, it is difficult to disentangle the threads of coloni-alism, racism, and cultural fundamentalism fromcitizenship inequality as such (Taguieff 1990, Wieviorka1996, Feldblum 1999). To my knowledge there is no de-tailed study of street-level bureaucrats who are French

citizens of immigrant ancestry (especially North or WestAfrican) and interact with recent migrants in a fashioncomparable to Mexican American INS officers. Suchstreet-level figures do appear, however, as pro-immigrantadvocates and service-providers in Ralph Grillos (1985)interesting ethnography of Lyon. More important, hisaccount shows that the institutionalization of redistri-bution in the modern citizen-stateschools, housing in-spections and public housing, hospitals and medical serv-ices, transportation, etc.creates the immigrant,rendering the outsider distinct from the citizen as recip-ient of public charity and not normal public entitlement.One gathers that, leaving aside racism, collective rightsand redistributions and thus daily life experiences still

stratify.Italy presents a more complicated but in some ways

more telling instance of citizenship politics. Long a mi-grant-sending country, Italy now receives substantialEastern European and African entrants. Lacking a co-herent citizenship and immigration policy, it handlesnew migration issues with difficulty. Jeffrey Cole (1997)shows how tolerance based on the long Italian experienceof out-migration fares in these new circumstances. Poorurban Sicilians, who in many ways are in competi-tionor nearly sowith migrants for jobs and services,do empathize with the shared migration experience butstill mostly resent it, feeling put at risk by the new mi-grant presence. However, living in a political contextdominated by patronage and marginalization, they do notsense a potential for citizenship-based action to limit orexclude new arrivals. In important ways they are formalbut not substantive citizens themselves. Northern Ital-ians, in contrast, encounter migrants not as competitorsbut rather as occupants of subordinate labor markets andinformal economies; they may well benefit from the mi-grant presence. Yet the Italian north sustains aggressiveanti-immigrant movements, in Coles analysis preciselybecause of its citizen empowerment (rooted in deep classstruggles) and the longer historical separation of north-erners from direct experience with the circumstances of

migrant lives. Still, in the Italian case, race confoundsthe citizenship question.

The Italian and especially the French instances suggestthat where citizenship is not ethnicized there is a re-peated sequence of exclusion, struggles for inclusion, andwithdrawal of expressed empathy with new arrivalswhen inclusion has been achieved. In this recursive pro-cess, membership in the political collectivity apparentlyserves as a summary sign of diverse social claims andinstitutional delivery forms, some governmental andsome extragovernmental, that are unequally distributedin advanced capitalism. This account, however, reliestoo heavily on the social actors omniscient awarenessof institutions and privileges. My argument, instead, isthat citizenship is a life process within these claims andinstitutions, one that can be tracked in community his-tory and personal stories, and this ongoing experienceshould be the focus of ethnography.

Mexican Americans have suffered as much as anygroup from citizenship discrimination and racism. In theU.S.-Mexican borderlands, the practices of citizenshipemerged precisely to repress Mexican immigrants. LindaGordon (1999) shows how the middle classes of Arizonacopper mining towns in the early 1900s shed their ownethnic and religious diversity to become whites, incontradistinction to Mexicans, by acting as citizensmobilized to protect collective decency. As a result, re-gional labor markets, education, residence, and politicswere segregated by race (Barrera 1979, Montejano 1987,Velez-Ibanez 1996). In this racialized social formation,Anglo-Americans treated Mexicans not only as a bi-ologically separate group but also as anticitizens, peoplewith a distinctive propensity for short-term labor andthen a return to a natural homeland in Mexico.

Mexican Americans responses to this discriminationhave varied, with some advocating solidarity of Mexicanpeople in the two nations and others advocating U.S.integration (Allsup 1982, Alvarez 1988, Foley et al. 1977,Navarro 1998, Rosales 1999). Not surprisingly, given thedominant societys notion of Mexicans as the inverse ofcitizens, equal substantive treatment of MexicanAmericans as citizens has been a long-standing goal. Theparticulars of this liberationist theme are important. Pro-citizenship Mexican Americans, whatever their personalsympathy with or interest in Mexico, have opposed thenotion that they are naturally most loyal to Mexico andwill ultimately return there. Likewise, they have fought

for educational, political, and job opportunities in publicinstitutions and primary labor markets, pushing the dooropen a crack with military service and going on to careersin the governmental civil servicein the state and localpolice and as prison guards and immigration officers. TheUnited States, with its vast, violent state machinery andits relatively weak unions and public services, gives apeculiarly military and police slant to the achievementof citizenship. At the same time, Mexican Americanshave waged their struggle in a discursive and legal land-scape slanted toward an individualistic-contractual no-tion of citizenship rights. In the United States, govern-mental redistributions and the respect accorded



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members of the political community are available onlyto those who earn them by their productive work andprosperity in a broadly capitalist economy and society(Fraser and Gordon 1998). Each step in the liberationstruggle has not only produced legal change but alsoshaped the Mexican Americans who pioneered andfollowed.4

Pablo Vila (2000) describes Mexican Americans in theTexas border city of El Paso as sharply distinguishingthemselves from Mexico and recent Mexican immi-grants. Both in their own experience as long-term U.S.residents and in the discourse of the larger society, Mex-ico is associated with poverty and suffering. Vilas Mex-ican American informants thus narrate a U.S. identityin distinction to Mexican ones. He also found amongthem extensive support for the INS Operation Block-ade, which drastically slowed undocumented crossingin El Paso. Patricia Zavella (1994), discussing jobs, wel-fare, and health care with Latinas in California, reportstheir belief that citizenspeople who belong in theUnited Statesdeserve more redistributive rights andbetter economic conditions than new arrivals. Opinionpolls also show that Mexican Americans hold somewhatrestrictive positions on immigration policy questions (dela Garza et al. 1992:100101), but the patterning of ideasand actions in the Mexican American population is com-plex. Robert Alvarez (2001) discovered a movement torediscover ethnic roots among retired Mexican Ameri-cans who in an earlier phase of their lives had achievedU.S. integration. Flores and Bienmayor (1997) report onsocial movements that take action in terms of explicitcitizenship rights and capacities in the United States butremain grounded in community culture and ethnic iden-tity. Hence, INS officers are best situated in a range ofalternative views of and labile stances on immigrationand nationality within the Mexican American commu-nity. We might reasonably posit that INS officers aremore critical of recent immigrants than the MexicanAmerican population as a whole, but they are not mark-edly unrepresentative and, leaving aside that question,their case remains intriguing because their developmentas citizens motivated them to join a law enforcementagency openly and overwhelmingly directed at people oftheir own national origin.

To focus on the Mexican American officers is not to

4. Ong (1996) argues that achieving U.S. citizenship means ac-cepting hidden racial discourses, and in many ways belonging in

the United States does involve subtle models forwhiteness(Brod-kin 1998, Delgado 1997, Delgado and Stefanicic 1997, Park 1996,Sanjek 1994). I have been sensitive to the white model among Mex-ican Americans and noted subtle racial assumptions when theyoccurred, but INS officers differed considerably in the ways inwhich they handled the balance between whitening and ethnicity-tolerant versions of citizenship. Some maintained considerableMexican American cultural affiliation and saw U.S. citizenship asessentially nonethnic; others thought of themselves as rugged in-dividuals who had broken with any version of membership exceptthe purely contractual, while still others clearly did embrace anassimilationist, whitening notion of belonging. Rather than insiston seeing a uniform racial discourse in the face of complex evi-dence, I concentrate on the explicit and consistent concern of in-formants with nationality.

isolate them for criticism as if they carried some highermoral burden by the combination of their job and theirputative ethnicity. Their dutiesexercising force overoutsiders, shepherding them through a bureaucratic pro-cess and arresting violatorscreate contradictions andconflicts, but they speak well for themselves, showingpride in having obtained civil service jobs in a prejudicedsociety and determination to enforce immigration lawfairly. In raising the question whether Mexican Ameri-can officers sense a common fate with Mexican immi-grants, then, I do not assume that ancestry is essencebut simply point out that this choice was available inlife histories to officers and seek to understand why theychose otherwise.

My central argument is that internal struggles toachieve substantive citizenship result in institutionallydelivered rights and redistributions that shape externalpolitics of inclusion and exclusion of new immigrantsfrom such rights and redistributions. To identify this pro-cess in complex ethnographic material, I emphasize fivethemes. First, I examine how citizen-officers contrasttheir legal standing with official migrant statuses. Yetsuch formal distinctions do not seem important enougheither in officer accounts or in daily life to explain whycitizenship should form a meaningful divide. Second, Ianalyze officers life histories, emphasizing their socialmobility from laboring to civil service jobs as a citizen-ship-forming process without assuming that mobility in-herently leads to separation.5 Third, I delineate officersinvolvement in substantive citizenship institutions frommilitary service to medical insurance coverage and theways in which they draw on these to distance themselvesfrom new immigrants. Given the synthesis of citizenshipper se with segmented capitalism, I particularly note ref-erences to primary labor markets and the redistributiveclaims attached to them. Fourth, I address householdreproduction as a differentiating force when families ofcitizens and noncitizens have unequal claims on gov-ernments and firms; I highlight especially as a divisiveforce the officers concern with their childrens futureand the competition with other children in such insti-tutional settings (Carrier and Heyman 1997). This alsoinvolves gendered aspects of citizenship in the opposi-tion to immigration, again consistent with the internal-external citizenship interplay (Jones 1998, Gordon 1999).Throughout these four analyses there is an emphasis onthe experience of citizenship not only as participatory

standing in society, its more active version, but also asits passive version, the routinization and bureaucrati-zation of past struggles in the form of benefits handedout to rightful recipients. I suggest that the latter frames

5. Mexican Americans are cognizant of historical segmentation be-tween recent immigrants and longer-established populations, some-times expressing it as a distinction between Mexican(o) andMexican American (or cognate terms). I do not regard length ofresidence as an alternative explanation for officers attitudes, how-ever, since by coming from families longer in the United States andmore socially mobile they are more involved with citizenship-form-ing events and processes than new immigrants and temporary bor-der-crossers.



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conflicts as having to do with legitimate versus illegit-imate receipt of such benefits. The fifth theme is morespecific to the INS work culture. Having committedthemselves to this job, Mexican American officers par-ticipate in strong peer groups that fervently expound acollective self-concept as an embattled but heroic im-migration-control force (Heyman 1995a, 2000). There isno doubt that this context shapes what officers say aboutimmigrants and citizenship generally, but a purely work-place-based interpretation begs the larger question whythese jobs and their work cultures are available to, de-sired by, and persuasive for Mexican Americans.

Counterposed to these experience-near analyses areothers that emphasize collective social categories andideologies as shapers of the expressed moral imagination.I assume a categorical notion of shared humanity,whether citizen or not.6 By posing the counterfactualpossibility of cross-societal empathy, one can understandbetter through contrast what officers do say about im-migrants, in which inequality of life paths is emphasized,in pity as much as in criticism, rather than shared fates.Within the discourse separating citizens and immigrants,I contrast discourses that accept and value MexicanAmerican culture within U.S. citizenship with ones thatrequire whitening (see n. 4). The categorical positionadopted by most officers is that Mexican American eth-nicity is fully consistent with U.S. identity and that cit-izens should significantly outrank new immigrants inrights and redistributions, usually expressed in terms ofadvocating policies limiting the numbers and kinds ofnew immigrants. One possible discourse officers did notuse, though they made negative references to it, dividesshared humanity into broad ethnic groupings (LatinAmericans and U.S. Latinos) rather than members of var-ious nation-states. In keeping with the analysis of iden-tity above, I hold that categorical ideologies are insuf-ficient explanations in themselves. Instead, officersintimate experiences and self-definition shape their re-ception and use of these categorical contrasts.

Having explored nation-state citizenship in terms ofinternal privilege and lack of empathy with outsiders, Iaddress the question of new scales and modes of citi-zenship, more local or more transnational, suggestingthat high-scale inequalities produce privilege and maypossibly constrain expressed empathy in these new

6. I am reluctant to insert myself too much into this work. Still,it may be helpful to readers for me to clarify my own positions. I

do not share an immigration-restrictionist position withthe officersI interviewed, but my approach (Heyman 1998a) has emphasizedrecognizing the ideas and interests of both restrictionists and lib-erals. My main concern is with empathy and mutual moral rec-ognition between categorically separated populations; in Heyman(2000:643) I mention my perspective while sympathetically de-scribing the moral dilemmas of INSofficers. I have also documentedthe liberation struggle of Mexican Americans in the U.S. border-lands (Heyman 1992, 1995b) and am drawn to the present subjectnot by a desire to judge and condemn but by a great interest in andsympathy with officers use of governmental jobs and state ma-chinery to render their lives decent and secure. In any case, I havetried to present sufficient evidenceindividual testimony and ag-gregate informationto allow for an open and even-handed con-sideration of the topic.

modes of citizenship much as they do in nation-statecitizenship. Arguably, all participatory citizenship strug-gles that culminate in the passive receipt of institution-alized labor-market and redistributive rights differentiateinsider and outsider life-worlds, establish predictablepoints of conflict, and, together with explicit agendas ofright-populist politicians, promote citizen distance fromand lack of sympathy with new arrivals. Whether thisis inevitable, however, is very much in question both inanalysis and action.

INS Officers, Race, and Immigration: AnOverview

Historically, the INS was an explicitly racist organiza-tion. Officers were overwhelmingly Anglo-Americanthrough the 1960s. During mass sweeps such as Oper-ation Wetback in 1954, the Border Patrol was an occu-pying force in Mexican American communities (Garca1980). Border Patrol Spanish textbooks from 1943, 1977,and 1988, which are influential in training, contain apersistent ethnic stereotype representing all immigrantsas humble Mexican peasants seeking jobs (Heyman1995a:26768). Mexican Americans entered the INS inlarge numbers in the mid-1970s, and my 199192 inter-views and observation indicated no intraorganizationalAnglo/Mexican racism in the border region (though I didnote gender and white-black conflicts). Latinos occupiedone-third of INS officer ranks in the Western Region,where I worked. In 1992 the chief patrol agents of thetwo largest Border Patrol sectors, El Paso and Chula Vista(San Diego), were Latinos; one of them later became theregional commissioner and then chief of the BorderPatrol.

I came to study the INS as part of research since 1982on the U.S.-Mexican border as an organization of powerand on the people in the two nations that are interrelatedacross it and through it (see, e.g., Heyman 1991, 1994,1999, 2000, 2001b). This research included a U.S. bordercity (Douglas, Arizona) where Mexican Americans strug-gled against profound racism and economic exploitation(see Heyman 1992, 1995b). There, I began to hear thecomplicated discussions of mutuality and conflict be-tween Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans. I wasnot initially prepared to understand this, but it became

increasingly important in my fieldwork on the INS,which contained such a significant proportion of Mexi-can American officers. This fieldwork included obser-vations of border patrolling, ports of entry, workplaceraids, immigration court, and so forth (see Heyman1998b, 2001a). In conjunction with observations, I con-ducted 104 in-depth, open-ended interviews systemati-cally representing the major functions and branches ofthe INS in the California/Arizona border region and themajor demographic components of the INS workforce.These interviews were informed by my previous studiesof border populations and communities and my obser-vations of INS officers at work, which allowed for sub-



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table 1INS Officer Attitudes Toward Immigration

Category

Immigration

Liberalize Restrict Unclear

Mexican Americans 0 (0%) 28 (85%) 5 (15%)Anglo-Americans 7 (10%) 54 (79%) 7 (10%)African Americans 0 (0%) 3 (100%) 0 (0%)

not e : Percentages are of rows, not columns.

table 2INS Officer Attitudes Toward Ethnicity/Citizenship

Category

Ethnicity/Citizenship

Distinguish Merge Unclear

Mexican Americans 29 (88%) 2 (6%) 2 (6%)Anglo-Americans 38 (56%) 16 (24%) 14 (21%)African Americans 3 (100%) 0 (0%) 0 (0%)


stantive and probing conversations with the inter-viewees.

The interviews were representative of Mexican Amer-ican officers in the regional INS. Of the 104 respondents,33 were Mexican Americans. Hispanic officers in the INSWestern Region form 32% of the regional workforce forthe relevant job titles and branches, the same percentageinterviewed (U.S. INS n.d. [1992]). For these job titles,the Western Region is 17% female; 20% of the inter-viewees were women, 9 of them Mexican Americans.Thirteen Mexican American officers worked in the Bor-der Patrol (the uniformed immigration police) and 12 inInspections (which reviews entries at the border and air-ports). Eight served in other branches such as Investi-gations (plainclothes interior immigration police), Ad-judications (the branch that processes applications forlegal immigration and change of status), and Detentionand Deportations. Eight Mexican American intervieweesheld supervisory rank; 2 were managers of major units.

All the informants expressed opinions about recentimmigrants, differentiating among them to varying de-grees, and about how restrictive the United States shouldbe in admitting legal immigrants and in border control.Most of them were explicit about how they viewed var-ious national-origin groups. They held two basic posi-tions: they opposed ethnic prejudice and stereotyping in-side the United States, and they rejected claims to apan-Latino or pan-Mexican solidarity of U.S. citizenswith documented and undocumented aliens. Consistentwith the latter view, they favored more restrictive im-migration policies. These restrictionist positions hadthree components, which although logically distinct ac-tually came together in interviews: they called for effec-tive, intensive border control over undocumented mi-gration, reduced numbers of legal immigrants, andrejection of special legalization programs (converting un-documented residents to legal permanent residents) andwere critical of the qualities of recent immigrants. Theseopinions were common among all INS officers, repre-senting a workable rationale for immigration policing inan era when overt racism is publicly disapproved. In-terestingly, Mexican American interviewees clusteredaround these two propositions (opposition to prejudiceand immigration restriction) more strongly than the INSinterviewees as a whole.

I first coded interviews on the basis of my assessmentof the overall pattern of statements in them on two axes:

(1) whether the respondent felt that immigration policyshould be tightened or liberalized (for the latter, I did notcount doubts about current policys efficacy, which werewidespread) and (2) whether the respondent distin-guished between ethnicity (e.g., Mexican-origin) and cit-izenship (e.g., United States) or conflated Mexican eth-nicity with outsider status (tables 1 and 2). In bothinstances I erred on the side of caution, relegating am-biguous interviews to the unable to determine cate-gory. This coding was done after the fact (it was not partof the original research design) and in a simple fashion,so it must be viewed within its limitations and specificpurposes. It is not the centerpiece of the empirical work

but serves as an introduction to the key issues, as aframework for the interviews presented later, and as away of showing that the selected in-depth cases are rep-resentative of the whole.

The results presented in table 3 cluster in three pat-terns of association among answers to the dichotomouspropositions. Respondents who supported extensive im-migration and distinguished ethnicity from nationalitywere labeled immigration liberals. Those who wouldsubstantially reduce kinds or numbers of immigrantswere labeled restrictionists, here differentiated as cit-izen restrictionists if they distinguished ethnicity andcitizenship and as prejudiced restrictionists if theymerged Mexican American ethnicity with Mexican na-tionality. No other combinations occurred. Any casewhere either proposition was undetermined in tables 1and 2 was relegated to undetermined in table 3. Mex-ican American INS officers clustered strongly at the cit-izen restrictionist position, along with the few AfricanAmerican officers. Anglo-American officers varied. Someof them manifested prejudiced citizenship, and a few de-fended the line between citizens and aliens less vehe-mently than the others, permitting themselves seriousexpressions of skepticism about the course of U.S. im-migration policy or envisioning their work as encour-aging and serving rather than controlling new arrivals.Even so, citizen restrictionism was also the mode forAnglo-American officers.

Three features of INS history have shaped MexicanAmerican officers as citizen restrictionists. First, theyentered the INS in large numbers during a period of de-clining and then disappearing racism in the organization.Second, they inherited archaic INS stereotypes of Mex-ican border immigrants, though for many Mexican



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table 3Clusters of INS Officer Attitudes

ImmigrationLiberals

CitizenRestrictionists

PrejudicedRestrictionists Undetermined

Mexican Americans 0 (0%) 26 (79%) 2 (6%) 5 (15%)Anglo-Americans 7 (10%) 30 (44%) 16 (24%) 15 (22%)African Americans 0 (0%) 3 (100%) 0 (0%) 0 (0%)


Americans this is diminished by their personal knowl-edge of the region. Third, they received from nationalpolitics an increasingly intense mandate to stop illegalimmigration and control the border. One can readilyenvision how this rhetoric encouraged a citizen restric-tionist stance, but it is deeply rooted in officers personalhistories.

Mexican American Officer Aggregate LifeHistories

The collective experiences of Mexican American INS of-ficers show the citizenship-forming processes at work intheir lives. Eighty-five percent of the officers interviewedhad grown up in border cities or counties; only one didnot come from a border state. Three were first-generationU.S. residents (they had immigrated), 10 second-gener-ation (their parents had immigrated), 9 both second- andthird-generation (depending on the parent), 7 third-gen-eration, and 4 fourth-generation or more. Thus, almostall of these officers had grown up in households alreadyincorporated into the United States, to use LeoChavezs (1992) term for enduring immigrant settlementin and orientation to the new society. Only two officershad had a markedly transnational childhood, moving be-tween Mexico and the United States, but the majorityhad an immigrant parent. I cannot speculate about whatimmigrant parents and grandparents taught their chil-dren about identification with or resistance to the INSand U.S. citizenship generally, but when these officersdiscussed their family backgrounds they emphasizedpositive views of U.S. citizenship.

The historical periodization of U.S.-Mexicans helps todefine the political-ideological resources with which in-

dividuals articulate claims such as citizen and rejectionof prejudice. The 194065 Mexican American genera-tion sought nonethnicized citizenship, while the 196575 Chicano generation asserted a complex mixtureof ethnic self-identity and citizenship claims for civil andpolitical rights. Political generations emerge in youngadulthood, but they do not dictate uniform attitudes;rather, they suggest loosely shared experiences and per-spectives (Mannheim 1952[1928]). One officer turned 20prior to 1940, 2 did so during the 194064 Mexican Amer-ican generation, 17 did so during the 196575 Chicanogeneration, and 13 did so in the post-1975 aftermath ofthe Chicano generation. Thus, Mexican American INS

agents inherit rights claims from two generations of pow-erful citizen activists; perhaps this accounts for their pat-tern of rejecting racist stereotyping while embracing U.S.citizenship.

Just over two-thirds (23/33) of interviewees namedboth English and Spanish as their native languages. Ofthe remainder, who were raised as monolinguals, morehad grown up speaking only English (7/33) than Spanish

(3/33). Although a shift to English does not indicate lossof Mexican-origin ethnic identity (Keefe and Padilla1987; Velez-Ibanez 1996:14445), it does suggest somelinguistic distance from the largely Spanish-monolingualimmigrant population with which the INS works. Myobservations showed clearly that Latino officers who re-tained Spanish fluency were more effective at reducingthe tension in interactions with immigrants than officersfor whom Spanish was a second language (most INS of-ficers and all Border Patrol officers take Spanish languagecourses). To this extent Spanish fluency tempers bu-reaucratic indifference, but, as interviews below dem-onstrate, it has little effect on attitudes towardimmigrants.

Much more striking, especially in light of citizenshiptheory, is the difference between parents occupationsand the civil-service jobs of INS officers. Federal officerpositions are allocated in rule-governed job markets withstable employment and ascending careers, and they pro-vide relatively high pay and benefits. In contrast, themodal parental occupation is laboring, low-income, andcharacterized by casual employment or nonascending ca-reers.7 While some parental working-class jobs have con-tractually regulated career ladders and benefits muchlike the civil service (if not the white-collar location inthe U.S. status system), most parents do not have thesecurity that their offspring have. Likewise, most Mex-ican American INS officers have some college education

(27/33), while most of their parents have not. The edu-cational and career track comparison between parent andchild proves quite significant in officers memories aboutobtaining their INS jobs.

For many interviewees, the first step into a bureau-cratized labor market was employment in the U.S. mil-

7. Among the parents of INS officers with a declared occupation,2 were small-business owners, 1 was a farm owner, 5 were educatedwhite-collar workers in private-sector or government jobs, and 25had blue-collar, working-class jobs. Of those 25, 8 were in primarylabor markets (e.g., unionized mine and smelter workers) and 17in secondary labor markets (e.g., agricultural laborers).



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itary or a state or local police agency. Veteran status addscivil service points, and police and prison guards inborder municipalities often move up to better-paid INS,DEA, and Customs Service positions. Six officers weremilitary veterans; nine had worked as police officers andtwo as prison guards prior to joining the INS (just overhalf of the total [17/33, with no double-counted cases]).By taking these career paths, officers had experiencedstrictly disciplined organizations with ideologies of therule of law and patriotic nationalism. Such organizationsare opposed in principle to outsiders or lawbreakers. For-mer soldiers, like police, are thus well prepared for workin a control bureaucracy. More than half of them hadundergone these disciplines, a rate higher than for theINS interviewees as a whole. The importance of state-power-based citizenship-forming experiences in thiscommunity can hardly be overstated (e.g., on MexicanAmericans in the military, see Velez-Ibanez 1996:200206).

Life histories emphasize the way U.S. governmentagencies provide primary-labor-market opportunities inthe relatively poor U.S.-Mexican borderlands. When Iasked Mexican American interviewees about joining theINS,8 I posed two specific questions: What were yourthoughts as a Hispanic when you went to work for theINS? and Did you discuss your decision to work forthe INS with your family or friends? In reply to thelatter question, Mary Carrasco (this and all subsequentnames are pseudonyms) said:

Growing up here as a little girl, you see these as re-ally glorified jobs. . . . Im doing what I alwayswanted to do. The hometown people are very proud

that I achieved such a good goal, a government job

8. A perspicacious reviewer asked if there was evidence that Mex-ican Americans by joining the INS were self-selected for attitudesconcerning nationality, ethnicity, citizenship, and so forth. Whilethis is a reasonable hypothesis, there is evidence to support thecounterhypothesis that officers simply represent the large mass ofborderlands Mexican Americans who seek good government [cit-izen] jobs and thus unsystematically enter the particular worksituations and attitudes of the INS. I had an unusual opportunityto reconstruct the past of one such officer independent of his owntestimony, through other people he had known in his youth. Hewas described as having been a militant Chicano, that is, part ofthe ideological-political generation most marked by ethnic soli-darity across the U.S.-Mexican boundary. The town where he grewup was formally and informally segregated, and he was a relativepioneer in getting a municipal police post, a major target of the

Mexican American liberation struggle in that place. He then movedon to the INS. His present opinions (see Heyman 1995a:27677),distinguished by intelligent argumentation, are not simply a re-versal of his past ideology. He stood out among interviewees, forexample, in his criticism of fellow officers for their incompetencein Spanish and their stereotyping of Latinos as the target of im-migration policing. At the sametime, he was veryjudgmental aboutcurrent immigrants to the United States, holding them to be of loweducational and job capacity on the whole andthus notcontributorsto the best interests of the United States. In other words, he tookthe citizen-restrictionist position in my typology. It would be dif-ficult to interpret this in any other way than as an educated, pri-mary-labor-market, and prosperous-lifestyle Mexican American as-serting both ethnic equality inside the United States and distancefrom the conditions of contemporary immigrants.

here in [name of town]. The negative is from thepeople in Mexico. When I do an apprehension, whenI do a case, Im asked to look the other way, askedto be more compassionate because Im a Hispanic.My best defense is Look, I have a job; my family,my children need a place to eat.

When Carrasco offered the Its my job response, it mer-its underlining just what this job meant to her. In thetown she comes from and in which she works, federalcivil service jobs are glorified, at least in economicterms. In the past, the largest employer was a coppersmelter, where her father was a laborer. Unionizedsmelter jobs were well-paid and provided security forworkers families, but while local Mexican Americanswere intensely proud of them, they represented statusclosure, local racial inequality defining them as Mex-ican work (see Heyman 1992, 1995b). When the smelterclosed in 1987, the remaining working-class jobs werecasual positions in chile-packing sheds and discount

stores serving Mexican customers. Only the jobs ofprison guards and customs officers compared in socialcitizenship with Carrascos INS position. It is signif-icant that she phrased her statement in terms of herfamily (as a divorced parent, she is the only income pro-vider). In an uninterrupted sequence of statements, sheacknowledged her ethnicity in the United States butused her household economy to justify rejecting abroader pan-Mexican grouping.

Statements similar to Carrascos were common, be-cause most Mexican American officers have faced thesame sorts of impoverished and state-heavy borderlandslabor markets. Magdalena Barron, for example, reportedthat her father was a laborer and U.S. citizen, her mother

a housewife and a Mexican national. She had started towork in the INS in her sophomore year in high schoolas part of a late 1960s youth corps program in her borderhometown. After graduating from high school, she wentstraight to work in the INS, saying I was born in im-migration and It was my one and only significant job.Discussing why she did this, she said, A job in [nameof town] for the government is hard to come by. JohnnyEscobedo, meanwhile, reported justifying INS work to acritical friend:

When I first got in the Border Patrol, my family said,You finally got a good job. You were in the policedepartment for peanuts. I dont care what you did,

but you were not making good money. A very goodfriend in California turned cold all of a sudden be-cause of my work with the INS. He was a residentalien, very nationalistic: Youre arresting my com-

padres. I view it as an accomplishment: a betterjob, better pay, put two of my kids through college. Ihave had the means to send them to college, to pur-chase my own home.

Barrons and Escobedos statements refer to the sametown and assume similar economic conditions as theirframe of reference. Escobedo defends his job against crit-icism by citing home ownership and college education



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for his childrenkey social-reproductive components ofbelonging in the 20th-century United States.

Poorer, predominantly immigrant Latinos at the bor-der are less likely to have children in college, and theirhomes (which they may own) may be more run-down inoutward appearance (Griffith and Kissam [1995:chap. 4]relate secondary labor markets in agricultural labor tohousing and lifestyle on the border). What role mightthis lifestyle comparison play? The aggregate data andthe several brief quotations sketch an answer in termsof a life-history process among Mexican American offi-cers. The process centers on the difference between par-ents and offspring in a highly segmented and rather im-poverished region of the U.S. capitalist economy andpolity. Some of the officers came from families with pri-mary-labor-market jobs, though most did not, but all ofthem had achieved (by their standards) social mobilityinto that market in a setting where government agenciesoffered the rare good job. This accomplishment hadled them to envision the distinctive value of their jobsand, indeed, their whole way of life, for the future oftheir children. Achieving first mobility and then pres-ervation of position had engaged them in a citizenshipnarrowly conceived in terms of their INS duties, patrol-ling circles of membership, and broadly in terms oftheir legal status vis-a-vis immigrants. Socially encour-aged transcendence of their parents life-worlds (thoughwhat I lack most in these interviews is a solid sense ofcross-generational transmission of communal ideas andfeelings) also removes them from the equivalent life-world today among immigrants. The aggregate life-his-torical experience of these 33 people is not simply anagenda I imposed on them; concern with jobs, policeexperiences, and so forth, cropped up repeatedly in theinterviews, raised and pressed home by the officersthemselves.

Four Mexican American Officers

My central argument is that there is a relationship be-tween the substantive institutions of citizenship, the in-dividual life history, and the attitudes people express to-ward outsiders. Such connections can best be made inextended views of particular officers. Here I explore foursuch cases. This material has the virtue of bolsteringethnographic integrity by presenting complex and some-

times ambiguous interview synopses rather than select-ing out of context the anecdotes most supportive of anargument.9 I have arranged the cases in a continuumfrom Chuy Ramrez, who is explicitly concerned withbeing unprejudiced toward people of Latin American or-igin, to Jenny Gonzalez, who is prone to negative ster-eotyping of people from Mexico. By doing this I haveallowed for alternative interpretations of this material,including the informants own varied thinking about therelevance or irrelevance of ethnicity/race to their lives.

9. In Heyman (1995a) I present five other Mexican American officerinterviews that further confirm my analysis.

Taken together, however, we see the following consis-tent patterns: (1) expressed moral distance from recentimmigrants and border-crossers, signaled not only bycriticism but also by an onlookers pity and the use ofthe third-person plural pronoun, they; (2) relatively re-strictive positions on immigration policy and policy ra-tionale questions; (3) the separation of personal identity,whether ethnic or not, from Latin America; (4) identi-fication with the mission and camaraderie of the INS;and (5) a strong emphasis on the personal accomplish-ment of getting a good government job with redistribu-tive benefits that support the household economy.

When the officers were interviewed, they spoke di-rectly and indirectly to various audiences. The directaudience was myself, an Anglo-American academic, of-ten perceived as a stereotypical immigration liberal (seen. 6). A fair amount of effort was spent persuading methat the INSs job was legitimate. In general, officers havethe idea that people do not understand the Service andwould appreciate it more if they could just hear aboutits daily work. Three indirect counterparts views, usu-ally presented as on-the-job encounters, were introducedand responded to during the interviews. Mexican Amer-ican INS officers confront appeals from Mexicans orother Latin Americans for preferential treatment on thebasis of shared origins and also receive criticism for de-nying it or simply for enforcing the law. Such encountersinduce reflections on citizenship distinctions. Anothertypical encounter is with Anglo-American tourists re-turning from day trips to Mexico who assume that theyare exempt by race from immigration law (unfamiliarwith the border, they lack local knowledge about boththe discretionary power of INS inspectors and the largenumbers of Latino U.S. citizens in the region). Thisbrings forth reflections on racism and deethnicization.Finally, officers sometimes clash with legal immigrantsand U.S. citizens of Mexican and other Latin Americanorigin. Legal residents and citizens at times vocally as-sert their right to be in the United States, free fromINS surveillance and control, possibly to distinguishthemselves from the more vulnerable outsiders. To com-prehend the individual perspective, then, it is necessaryto recognize that Mexican American officers are involvedin complex and sometimes conflictual dialogues over na-tional origin and citizenship.

Jesus Chuy Ramrez was a senior immigration in-spector at a major port of entry. Born of U.S.-citizen par-

ents in a border city in 1953, he came of age in the af-termath of the Chicano political generation, andalthough he expresses no overt allegiance to this gen-eration he does reflect a positive sense of ethnic self-awareness even when he is explicitly critical of immi-gration liberalism. After high school, he worked as a jailguard and then as a police officer in his hometown. Hethen joined the Border Patrol for its better pay and ben-efits; although he sees his job a serving society, he doesnot emphasize this motivation. After serving for threeyears elsewhere, he transferred to Inspections in orderto return to his hometown.

While fleshing out his life history, I asked Ramrez



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whether he had discussed his decision to join the BorderPatrol with friends or family. In responding, he used re-membered conversations with other Mexican Americansto articulate his distance from Mexican aliens: My fam-ily was kind of proud of me getting a job like this. Myfriends at the police department, their opinion was, Whychase our own people? But its our own people who arecommitting all those burglaries, so I didnt care whatthey thought. Notice the double-sided use of the phraseour own people to criticize what in his mind was anaive assertion of pan-Latino solidarity. He immediatelyfollowed with a passage that shows that he was wrestlingwith sympathy for others versus his need to keep his job(interestingly, he volunteered this statementit was notinduced by questioning): Sometimes, for example whenI have a prosecution case going, you see these people.Personally, I feel very sorry for them, but I remind myselfof a job I have to do. I cannot close my eyes to the jobI have to do. I dont wantto lose my job;my familycomesfirst before these people. I feel sorry. In this statement,he articulated his sensitivity to Mexican lives, havinggrown up on the border, but his use of the constructionthese people and the pronoun them (more distantthan his previous critical our own people) indicatedthat he pitied them but did not identify himself as be-longing to that set of needy people. Ramrez is quiteexplicit in ranking his commitments: job/social repro-duction first, personal sympathy (possibly with an ele-ment of shared ethnicity) second. Family in this pas-sage is a trope for the social-reproductive trajectory ofhouseholds in an unequal society. This is a rather directillustration of the framing effects of differentiated labormarkets and attached redistributions.

Perhaps in indirect response to envisioned critics ofthe organization, Ramrez repeatedly emphasized that hedid not discriminate against Mexicans. Here he was ex-plaining to me the process of selectively halting cars ata Border Patrol highway checkpoint; to perform this taskeffectively, officers profile and disproportionately ques-tion Latino-appearing people: We stopped cars from thesouth [Mexico] or U.S. border states with Hispanicpeoplein the car. We were not trying to discriminate, but thenumbers of Hispanics you catch are tremendous; reallyits almost only Hispanics. Personally, I would stop carswith white people; I would question Germans, Europe-ans. Personally, I wouldnt want to be seen as a discrim-inating officer. Note the placement of the adverb per-

sonally to distinguish between his sense of self and therealities of his job. It is clear that he was wrestling withthese issues. Another way that he rejected discrimina-tion was to comment on arrogant returning tourists,whopresented an example of ethnicized assumptions aboutU.S. citizenship. When I asked him to free-associate onthe phrase American public (which I thought mightelicit policy ideas about citizens versus foreigners), heresponded with this experience-near comment: Theyare naive about what the Immigration Service is allabout. Local people know more, but tourists walk inignoring you. They cant understand why you ask fortheir citizenship. Cant you see my blond hair, my blue

eyes, cant you see that Im not Mexican? In this state-ment, he uses his own knowledge of U.S. citizenship law(which all INS officers memorize in training school andwhich he considered the most interesting material hehad studied) to dispute a racialized version of U.S. citi-zenship (the self-righteous, presumably Anglo-Americantourists). Americans of all origins are equally subject toborder inspection. In a place where most INS duties tar-get people of Mexican origin, this encounter offers Ra-mrez an unusual opportunity to propound unprejudicedlaw enforcement.

As a port-of-entry inspector, Ramrez could exercisepositive discretion as well as turning away, arresting,andprosecuting people (in this, he differed from the inter-viewees who follow). For example, discussing the issuingof border-crossing cards (which allow the bearer, a Mex-ican-side resident, to visit the United States for shoppingor personal reasons for up to 72 hours and 25 miles), heremarked, You have to learn to understand the way thatthey live over there. They have utility bills [evidence ofpermanent dwelling in Mexico considered in the issuingprocess] in someone elses name because it costs moneyto change the name. Personally, I will accept it if I seeright away that they are telling the truth. It is arguablethat this is a case of empathy, since it involves combin-ing local knowledge with an imaginative awareness of aless completely bureaucratized Mexican life-world.

Ramrez, among all the interviewees, did the mostcomplex balancing of self and work. At the policy level,he had faith in the possibility of an unprejudiced bordercontrol and immigration system. At the level of moralexpression, he recognized the plight of immigrants atleast with sympathy and at times empathized with theirlife conditions. At the same time, he identified stronglywith the breadwinner role for this family, in this case amale-gendered stance that was also associated with hisupward mobility as a police officer. Through this role,he found himself enforcing immigration law almostonly on Hispanics. One senses an internal struggle inhis statements, expressive of the dilemmas facing Mex-ican American officers. His care about avoiding stereo-typing and his relative sympathy contrasted with themore condemnatory opinions of the next interviewee,yet they expressed similar sentiments about their careertrajectory and present job that were essentialto their self-understanding as citizens.

Frank Moreno was a Border Patrol middle manager

nearing retirement. He was born in 1941 in El Paso, theson of a Mexican immigrant father and a New Mexicanmother, and had grown up as part of the Mexican Amer-ican political generation, which had left visible traces inhis perspective. He had completed one year of collegeand had had no police or military experience. Morenowas a Mexican American pioneer, having entered thePatrol in 1969 just as it began the transition from anAnglo-dominated to an integrated police force. Before hejoined it, however, he had worked as a salesman for nineyears and experienced severe discrimination. This hadmotivated him to take the INS job and shaped his per-ception of the Border Patrol as a fair organization.



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When I asked Moreno about his thoughts on being aHispanic in the INS, he said, I faced no discriminationin the Border Patrol. He then mentioned an allegationof discrimination against Mexican Americans in his sta-tion that had occurred about ten years after he joinedthe Service:

As a Hispanic in the Border Patrol I never had anyproblems. There were a couple of agents in the[name of] Station that claimed discrimination, but Iam on record in the media as saying that in my per-sonal case, as one of the senior guys, I was alwaysshown respect. I was asked for advice by the juniorguys.

There was one incident I faced as a trainee. I tookcare of it myself. There were two trainees and ajourneyman officer. The journeyman addressed meas Meskin [insulting Southwestern Anglo slang forMexican]. Hey, Meskin, do this, he said. I askedhim to call me by my name. If you do, Ill do what-

ever you want, I said, but next time if you addressme like that Ill knock you on your flat ass. I guesshe got the message, because he never did it again.

Being the only native-speaker [of Spanish] for solong, guys appreciated the chance to check with me.Its how you conduct yourself.

I cannot judge the validity of his contentions about thediscrimination allegations, but the way he understoodthem is important. He established respect for his workinside the INS and defeated racism by personal effort,merit, and character. He took an ethnicizing ele-mentSpanish-language skilland reinterpreted it as ameans of professional accomplishment in a U.S. context.

Characteristic of his political generation, Morenos self-presentation involves first the idea of ethnic-citizengroup pride and second the idea that personal success inthe institutions of the dominant society is an accom-plishment for the whole ethnic-citizen group.

Moreno held decidedly immigration-restrictionistopinions. Responding to my question about his decisionto join the Border Patrol, he highlighted the labor-marketcompetition between undocumented aliens and MexicanAmerican citizens, which is particularly severe and di-visive in El Paso: I talked to my family and my wifeabout joining the Patrol. It was no problem, because theMexican community suffers because of the illegals. Theylower wages. . . . My brother and I joined the Border Patrol

together. The place where my father worked was full ofillegals. When the word got out about his sons in theBorder Patrol, the illegals picked fights with him, and hewas eventually fired. He later extended his criticism ofimmigration from economic competition with illegalimmigrants to a negative lifestyle evaluation of poor im-migrants of any legal status. In the midst of questionsabout the details of antismuggling investigations, Mo-reno extemporized formulaic fears of an invasion oflower-class outsiders:

What I expect are new exodusesnow we are get-ting Chinese; in the future we will see Yugoslavs,

Russians. The U.S. has a liberal immigration policy.If the liberals keep up with laws to give amnesty,free gifts, theyre going to come in. I wonder whenthe American public will realize that we have to putan end to this some time. Look at the Mariel Cu-bansthe crime rate rose 500 percent in South Tuc-son. I was in Miamithey called them sco-

riatrash, garbage, Haitians, poor people. I have alot of compassion for these people in need, but howcan we solve everybodys problem? Immigration offi-cers, contrary to popular belief, have a soft heart; Irealize that I would do something if I was in Mexicoand starvingthe Border Patrol would pay hellcatching me.

At the end, after rather harsh statements, he sought toshow that he was personally sympathetic to immigrants.In doing this he drew on stock Border Patrol rhetoricabout the soft-hearted officer and the stereotypical hun-gry Mexican laborer involved in a game with the INS(see Heyman 1995a:26971). However, this pitying rhet-oric did not seem to be the core of his interview; a moretypical generalization was How can we solve every-bodys problem? as a way of arguing against a numer-ically generous legal immigration policy. To sort out Mo-renos complex statements, it helps to analyze the abovepassage in terms of citizenship and ethnicity. His im-migration-restrictionist rhetoric was not hostile to hisMexican American ethnicity; he criticized many eth-nicities among new immigrants, including Europeans.Rather, citizens were to be distinguished from outsidersbecause the latters lifestyle was unworthy. In his view,there was a clear distinction between Mexican Ameri-

cans, as Americans, and immigrant nationalities. Onecould argue that he had deeply assimilated INS work-place culture, signaled by his use of standardized INSrhetoric, but just as important was his self-formation inhis struggle to become part of it, his small campaign forinternalist citizenship. The officer in the next interviewwas less prone to identify with INS work culture butexpressed quite similar ideas about immigrant qualitiesand the migrant-citizen difference.

For Luis Louie Bernal, pride in a Mexican culturalrepertoire coexisted with strong criticism of recent Mex-ican immigration. Born in 1952 to a family that had beenmany generations in the United States, he had grown upon his fathers ranch near the border in South Texas. He

had served in the military and had a college educationthrough the Masters degree. He had worked as an ag-ricultural inspector near the border and then moved tothe better-paying Border Patrol. He stressed a public cit-izenship motive for this choicefighting against cross-border crime, especially narcotics smuggling. At the timeof the interview, he was a journeyman officer. His wasone of the most thought-provoking conversations I hadwith an INS officer, and he often manifested considerablecritical independence of INS assumptions and practices.Part of this, I think, came from his professional careerprior to the Border Patrol and part of it from his distinc-



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tive cultural background as a generationally deep bor-derlander, seen in this discussion of work issues:

The Spanish that is taught at the [Border Patrol]Academy is correct Castilian, but at the borderwhen you meet uneducated persons, it is hard to

speak with them in correct Castilian, so I use myborder Spanish. In no way can my partner strike upa conversation about smuggling, whereas I have a lotof informants with whom I can use the lingo. . . .Some guys [Patrol officers], when they [aliens] makethis sort of lie [a false claim to be a U.S. citizen],just dont have the knowledge. I lived close enoughto the line to be able to spot them. Being of His-panic background, I could spot them by clothing,language dialect, and mannerisms. Somebody whogrew up around the border will inadvertently mixEnglish into a mostly Spanish dialoguecomo sedice, how do you say itwhereas if they grew upentirely in Mexico, they will speak entirely in Span-

ish. I ask about local teachers, about school require-ments. There are differences in clothing: the heel ofthe boot; the leather in the jacket and the belt; thecowboy hat shapethe ones raised in the U.S. use amore Western-style shape of hat; the Mexicans use amore straight-up brim versus the Americans use amore oval one. Trends change on the border; rightnow the Mexican American style is the country-singer black felt hat.

He uses his local knowledge and self-acknowledgedHispanic background, however, for law enforcementgoals, defending citizenship by defeating false claims toit.

When Bernal applied to the Patrol, in his telling, hehad the support of his wife and family. One specific rec-ollection illustrates his self-perception as fair but en-forcement-minded: My family had a maid that was im-migrated; she was one of the finest people Ive everknown. I asked her what she thought of me going intothe Patrol, and she said she thought that they neededgood people, that I would be fair. Obviously she had heardsome negative things and thought I could use my posi-tion to be fair to both sides. This statement emphasizesan ethnically unbiased vision of the U.S. nation in theideal of fair immigration law enforcement. As we turnto his critical comments on immigrants, it seems mostappropriate to characterize this interview as drawing a

line between deserving substantive U.S. citizens and un-deserving new immigrants (whether formal citizens, le-gal residents, or undocumented), rather than betweendeserving ethnic/racial Americans and undeserving eth-nic/racial Latin Americans.

When the interview shifted from fine-grained personal,regional, and work contexts to the final section, whereI presented seven free-association terms about nation-ality and migration (Heyman 1995a:26566 n. 11), Bernalwas critical of U.S. immigration policy:

Q: Aliens.A: Problem.

Q: INS.A: Reconstruction. We need to change the ways weare doing it. One of my biggest criticisms was theamnesty program [the legalization of some formerlyundocumented persons resident in the United States,a provision of the 1986 Immigration Reform andControl Act]. I have no problem with people whoimmigrate legally, through the system. There arelots of professionals who could help the country. Butthe people Ive encountered in the amnesty programhave obtained their documents fraudulently.10 TheINS did not screen them enough. We had a babysit-ter, a young woman, with an amnesty card receivedfor being a farmworker in the U.S.; I could tell thatshe had never worked in the fields. A lot of highnarcotics violators carry amnesty cards. . . . I comefrom a farm; being around agriculture, I know thatits not an easy life. If we offer these people am-nesty, they wont work in the fields anymore; they

will go on a social welfare program. Its a lot easierfor the people Ive encountered.

Here Bernal distinguishes by labor market/lifestyle be-tween those who deserve substantive U.S. citizenship(professionals) and those who do not (narcotics vio-lators, welfare recipients). Of course, very few Mex-ican-border immigrants are professionals. Furthermore,as the following passage indicates, he is less sympatheticto legal immigrants (the only immigrants who get wel-fare, within considerable restrictions) than the stockproclamation of support for legal migration might sug-gest: Its very personal the way I feel. We went to thedoctor, our kids were held up by these kids on welfare.

They get food stamps; they dont understand the lan-guageand its paid for out of our pocket. Its gotten tobe Whats next? Bernal volunteered this statement inthe midst of a work-task section of the interview, not ata time when he was being asked for an explicit positionon his job or public policy. It came as a sudden, heartfeltburst of very personal testimony, and while it doesdraw on widespread rhetorics about immigrants, theyseem to be ones with real emotional importance to him.It grew out of a male-gendered chain of reasoning in-volving his laboring on behalf of his wife and family andexpressed a distinction between their rights to redistrib-uted resources and those of immigrant children. As hisremark about the doctors office reveals, his bureaucra-

tized, prosperous, and predictable citizen life-world, pro-

10. This statement is tendentious. On prime facie grounds weshould presume that approved legalized persons deservetheirstatusunder the law as it was written. Legalization occurred under twodifferent programs. The Special Agricultural Worker (SAW) program(established for the benefit of agribusiness) allowed more docu-mentation by affidavits than the regular legalization program; thelarge number of approved SAW applications compared with esti-mated agricultural workforces does suggest laxity (Juffras 1991:59,Baker 1990:166). This was not true for the main legalization pro-gram. INS officers seize on the weaker program because they dis-approve of peoples gaining access to citizenship (inthis caselegalimmigration) through an initially extralegal act (prior illegal resi-dence in the United States).



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viding generous health insurance, differs from the life-world of recent legal immigrants who alternate betweencasual employment and limited welfare support. Thisdisparity of life-worlds makes him not more sympatheticto those without privileges but less so. Bernal has noclose personal links to Mexico, but he has deep knowl-edge of and identification with the Rio Grande border-lands, an area of historical racial oppression (Montejano1987). One could envision him turning such a localstance into imaginative empathy with border-crossers,but his position is that he and his family are entitled ascit

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