Narratives of Immigration

Don Chepito lived in Monterrey, Nuevo León, Mexico.

During certain seasons, he left his home to make a living. He traveled north in search of work, in search of a future, perhaps simply in search of a way to make life a little better for his family.

He used to tell me stories about those journeys.

Many of them took place during the 1950s and 1960s, when he traveled to Hatch, New Mexico, to work in the fields. He remembered those trips with remarkable humor. Perhaps humor made the memories easier to carry. Or perhaps Don Chepito simply understood that a good story sometimes needs a little exaggeration.

One of my favorite stories involved a rabid coyote.

According to Don Chepito, the animal suddenly attacked him and tried to bite him. He reacted immediately and punched the coyote with such force that his entire arm went inside the animal. His arm went so deep, he claimed, that when he pulled it back out, he had turned the coyote completely inside out.

He told the story with absolute conviction.

We laughed.

Over the years, the coyote became part of our family repertoire. It was one of those stories that returned during Christmas gatherings, repeated and remembered until the narrative itself became part of the family.

But one day, Don Chepito changed his tone.

He told me another story.

This time, he did not talk about coyotes.

Crossing

He told me how difficult those journeys had actually been.

Each crossing carried uncertainty. Work waited on the other side, but access to that work required submitting the body to inspection, classification, and control.

He remembered being forced to remove his clothes.

He remembered chemicals being sprayed over his entire body.

He remembered pesticides.

He remembered that some workers were not even given the opportunity to close their eyes before they were sprayed. Their heads could be shaved. Their clothes inspected.

Sometimes, he said, they were ordered to throw away their underwear.

Then Don Chepito laughed.

Some of us were so poor, he joked, that we were not even wearing any.

That was Don Chepito.

Even inside a painful memory, he could find a way to make us laugh.

But humor does not erase humiliation.

Behind the joke was the memory of a body being inspected. A Mexican body crossing north to work. A body needed for agricultural labor and simultaneously treated as suspicious, dirty, and potentially dangerous.

He remembered insults.

“Lousy wetbacks.”

The same men who were allowed to enter because their labor was needed could be stripped, sprayed, shaved, and humiliated before being permitted to work.

They could cross.

But only under certain conditions.

The Desirable Worker

In “Constructing Rhetorical Borders: Peons, Illegal Aliens, and Competing Narratives of Immigration,” Lisa A. Flores examines how narratives of immigration participate in the construction of rhetorical borders. Immigration is not discussed only through geographic lines or immigration law. It is also constructed through language.

Words classify bodies.

Worker.

Peon.

Alien.

Illegal.

Wetback.

Each term carries a story about who belongs, who is useful, who is dangerous, and who may be allowed to cross.

The immigrant body can become desirable when labor is needed and undesirable when that same body demands recognition, dignity, or belonging.

Don Chepito's story exists inside this contradiction.

His labor was welcome.

His body was not.

The fields needed workers. The border, however, demanded that those workers first submit themselves to a process that marked them as different.

Access was possible, but dignity was negotiable.

Micaela Stayed Home

There is another part of Don Chepito's story that is easier to overlook.

Her name was Micaela.

While Don Chepito traveled north and faced the dangers of the journey, Micaela remained in Monterrey with their children.

She did not cross the border.

But she was also part of the migration story.

While he confronted fields, checkpoints, insults, and uncertainty in the United States, she confronted the risks of raising a family alone during his absence. The Monterrey of those years was not the Monterrey we know today. Distance was different. Communication was different. Waiting was different.

Migration narratives frequently focus on the person who leaves.

We follow the traveler.

We trace the route.

We imagine the crossing.

But every departure also creates an absence.

Someone stays.

Someone waits.

Someone continues everyday life while another person searches for work hundreds of miles away.

Micaela's labor did not take place in the fields of New Mexico.

Her labor took place at home.

Seventy Years Old

Many decades later, Don Chepito began receiving a pension from the United States.

He was nearly seventy years old.

After a lifetime of work and decades after those journeys to Hatch, the same country that had once inspected, sprayed, and controlled his body finally recognized his labor through a monthly benefit.

He enjoyed that pension for approximately fifteen years.

When he died, the benefit continued to support Micaela.

I often think about the strange chronology of that recognition.

First, the body works.

The body travels.

The body crosses.

The body is inspected.

The body is sprayed.

The body grows old.

And decades later, the system says: we remember that you worked here.

Who Gets to Tell the Story?

Immigration is frequently narrated through numbers.

How many crossed.

How many were detained.

How many workers were needed.

How many visas were issued.

How many people were deported.

Numbers are useful, but numbers do not tell stories about coyotes turned inside out.

They do not reproduce the laughter of an old man remembering his youth.

They do not explain why a joke appears in the middle of a painful memory.

They do not tell us about Micaela waiting in Monterrey.

They do not tell us what pesticides felt like against the skin.

This is why narratives of immigration matter.

The rhetorical border is constructed through official language, political discourse, media representation, and institutional categories. But another border narrative exists in kitchens, living rooms, family gatherings, oral histories, photographs, and stories repeated at Christmas.

Don Chepito never used the phrase “rhetorical border.”

He simply told me his stories.

Sometimes he talked about Hatch.

Sometimes about the fields.

Sometimes about humiliation.

And sometimes, if we were lucky, he told us again about the day he punched a coyote so hard that he turned it inside out.

I still do not believe him.

But I still remember the story.

https://vimeo.com/255455171

Sources and Credits

• Flores, Lisa A. “Constructing Rhetorical Borders: Peons, Illegal Aliens, and Competing Narratives of Immigration.” Critical Studies in Media Communication, vol. 20, no. 4, 2003, pp. 362–387.

• Flores, Lisa A. “Contested Borders: Immigrant Tales of (Un)Desirability and Access.” Discussion of mediated immigrant narratives, national belonging, and the rhetorical negotiation of desirability.

• Dorothea Lange. Photograph, 1942. Photo credit: Dorothea Lange.

• Institute of Oral History at UTEP. Archival video/oral history materials. Video credit: UTEP Institute of Oral History.