‘Migracorridos’: Another Failed Anti-Immigration Campaign

For centuries, Mexican narrative folk ballads, known as corridos, have chronicled the exploits of outlaws and rebels. Countless corridos have told the tribulations of smugglers trying to get their contraband across the border. And in recent decades, with the boom of the drug trade in Mexico, the songs have increasingly turned to stories about the narcotrafficking. But these “narcocorridos” existed long before the rise of today’s drug cartels.

It’s strange, then, that the U.S. Border Patrol would be promoting a genre so infused with anti-authoritarian sentiment. But that’s exactly what the law enforcement agency is doing, even releasing its own album of corridos.

In an attempt to deter immigrants from crossing the border, the Border Patrol distributed its “Migracorridos” album to dozens of radio stations in Mexico. The name of the CD plays on the Spanish for “migration” and the pejorative nickname for immigration enforcement agencies: La Migra.

Relatives of migrants who died crossing the border hang white wooden crosses on the U.S. border wall, pictured here in Nogales, Mexico. (By Karl W. Hoffman/www.karlwhoffman.com)

The CD is part of the Border Patrol’s “No Más Cruces en la Frontera” (No More Crosses on the Border) campaign, which has focused on purchasing airtime in Mexico for television and radio spots that provide cautionary tales for those thinking about heading to El Norte. The campaign marks the first time the Border Patrol has bought airtime for advertisements. The CD is the next leg of these efforts.

The “migracorridos” always end in death with a family broken apart. In the song “Veinte,” the narrator describes a treacherous journey north in which several people trying to crossover die of thirst in the desert with “blistered” and “scabby” feet from walking. Abelardo watches his cousin die of dehydration in the desert heat in the song “El Más Grande Enemigo.” Aberlardo decides to go back to Mexico to give his cousin a proper burial, vowing to his dead cousin: “If God takes my life, let it be in my beloved land.”

In “En La Raya,” a young man talks about his friend dying en la raya (on the line) and having to make a cross out of sticks to mark the grave. The sight of the wooden cross gives him the courage to return home and never attempt to cross again because he doesn’t want to see any more “crosses on the border.”

Often criticized for focusing almost exclusively on physical enforcement, the Border Patrol began turning to “safety” and “prevention” in recent years. This shift resulted in a multi-pronged approach to enforcement, including continuing construction of the wall and increased patrols along the border, but also things like the “No Más Cruces” campaign instituted as part of the “Border Safety Initiative”

The Border Patrol teamed up Elevación, a Washington, D.C.-based advertising agency to work on the campaign. With high-profile clientele like New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Elevación specializes in Latino/a marketing and outreach. The company has been working on the No Más Cruces campaign for seven years. With the help of Elevación, the Border Patrol has put out commercials, posters, and other kinds of promotional materials, but the “Migracorridos” CD is a first.

Elevación President Jimmy Learned told the BBC that he conducted research in Mexico “before deciding to target 25 radio stations in six states with the highest count of U.S.-bound émigrés.” Learned also said the campaign could soon be expanded to Central America.

The Border Patrol has not disclosed the costs of producing and distributing the CD. But an early part of the campaign in 2005 spent $1.5 million on television spots alone, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Young migrants caught by U.S. Border Patrol agents in southern Arizona after walking more than 25 miles through the desert. (By Karl W. Hoffman www.karlwhoffman.com)

The agency has been careful to keep its imprint off the album afraid Mexican audiences would disregard the songs if they knew who was behind it. Learned told the AP, “A lot of people thought the Mexican government was behind it – the last thing we wanted was to put ‘paid by la migra.’”

The Border Patrol has good reason to be concerned about public reaction if word spread that it was behind “Migracorridos.” Jose Gasca, manager of La Zeta radio station in Morelia, Michoacán, told the AP the songs hit a chord with audiences, but that if his listeners knew the message was sent courtesy of the Border Patrol, “They’d feel as if la migra was after them in their own country.”

Some critics see the campaign as emblematic of Bush-era federal funding for media propaganda under the “War on Terror” in the mold of military “psychological operations,” or PSYOPs. Nezua, a blogger for The Unapologetic Mexican website, notes a better name for the campaign might be “migrapsyops” or “psyop-corrdios.” Although some might argue that claims of PSYOPs are exaggerated, the U.S. intelligence community defines “gray propaganda” as situations in which the source of the information (the U.S. government) is deliberately hidden or ambiguous because disclosure would compromise its effectiveness.

The campaign can also be criticized for deploying notions of deficient masculinity to deter would-be-migrants. Throughout the album, the songs claim it takes a real man not to cross the border. In “Veinte,” the singer croons, “Chickening out is also a manly thing to do.” Indeed, in these songs stereotypical notions of machismo are simultaneously admonished and appealed to in trying to get immigrants to think twice about crossing.

The Border Patrol touts the campaign as a complete success. Agency spokeswoman Wendi Lee cites the decrease in migrant deaths from a record high of 492 in 2005 to 390 last year. But most interpretations on the decline in fatalities point to several other factors, including reduced migration because of the economic crisis and the immigration crackdown.

Ultimately, the No Más Cruces campaign, contrary to statements by the Border Patrol, does not address issues of safety along the border. The television spots and the songs do not offer any safety recommendations beyond telling migrants not to cross. And when attempts are made to address the safety of migrants, anti-immigrant activists – both within and outside of the U.S. government – roundly criticize these efforts with ridiculous and racist claims.

The cover of the Mexican government’s comic book guide for migrants.

The Mexican government, for instance, was harshly condemned by anti-immigrant activists for issuing a “Guide for the Mexican Migrant,” a 32-page comic book with information about the risks of crossing and information about foreigners’ rights in the United States regardless of immigration status.

In response to the guide, while serving as congressman, the virulently anti-immigrant Tom Tancredo (R-Colorado) issued a statement claiming that publication of the guide “was not an action of a friendly neighbor.” In an interview with the New StandardTancredo’s spokesman elaborated on his boss’ statement, claiming the guide not only encouraged illegal immigration, but that it also opened the door for terrorist attacks on U.S. soil: “You don’t know who is coming here just to look for a job, and who is coming to kill your family…. You’ve got to remember that the facial structure and skin color of Arabs and Hispanics is pretty similar.”

Unfortunately, since addressing issues of immigrant rights and safety is dismissed as an endorsement of undocumented entry – or worse, seen as some terrorist ploy – the death of migrants and the crosses on the border will continue.

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Marisol LeBrón is a NACLA Research Associate and writes about pop culture for her blogPost Pomo Nuyorican Homo. She is a doctoral student at the Program in American Studies at New York University. 

Friends of Friendship Park 

Contributed by John Fanestil 

This last Sunday, January 25, we celebrated communion across two different fences.  Let me tell you why.

As we approached the U.S.-Mexico border on the beach, we saw that there were four or five vehicles up on Monument Mesa, where usually there are only one or two.  I felt my heart beat a tad bit faster and I began to think that this was the day that Customs and Border Patrol would begin to enforce the ban they have declared on public access to Friendship Park.

As we climbed up on to the mesa, we approached the mesh fence that has been used to mark off Friendship Park as federal property.  We were approached by a very cordial Border Patrol agent, a woman.  She informed us – almost cheerfully – that the land inside the mesh fence was a construction zone and that our entry was not permitted.  “We know you are good law-abiding citizens,” she said, “and we hope you will obey the law.”  She also made a point to emphasize, “We have cameras trained on this area and your photographs will be taken.”  She turned and headed for her vehicle, and then remembered she had forgotten to communicate one last thing – “If you climb over the fence or damage it in anyway, you could be charged with destruction of federal property.”

I thanked her for the information, and I meant it.  The previous Sunday the agents on duty hadn’t bothered to acknowledge our presence – they just let us celebrate communion and chose to look the other way.  This had left us feeling a little uncertain, unsure of whether the ban on public access to Friendship Park was already in effect.  The communication this Sunday was both polite and clear.  It is now illegal to enter Friendship Park .  We have also been told in no uncertain terms that when the construction project is complete, the ban on public access will become permanent.  What has been for generations a celebrated meeting-place on the U.S.-Mexico border is now intended to be nothing more than an extension of the “enforcement zone” that is being created between double and triple walls across hundreds of miles of the border’s length.  If Customs and Border Patrol have their way, no-one will enter this enforcement zone from the south and no-one will be allowed to enter it from the north, either.  Excepting authorized law enforcement officers, it will become, quite literally, a “no-man’s land.” 

After thanking the Border Patrol agent for her clear communication, a number of us – with equal good cheer! – stepped around the mesh fence and into Friendship Park .  Before doing so, however, I made clear to everyone in our company that this was an act of civil disobedience, and I emphasized that no one should feel obligated in any way to join us.  (Across months of celebrating communion at Friendship Park we have established this as an important principle – no one is asked or expected to participate in anything with which they are not comfortable.)

 As I prepared to serve communion, it occurred to me we would have to be serving communion across TWO fences this week.  As always, there were people on the Mexican side of the border fence.  But this week, there were also a good number of people left behind the mesh fence at the cusp of the mesa on the U.S. side of the international boundary.  

 I moved the communion elements closer to the intersection of the two fences – one fence made of steel, running east to west, marking an international boundary; the other fence made of mesh, running south to north, marking off a new patch of U.S. soil that has just been declared by the U.S. government off limits to U.S. citizens.

I began: “On the night in which Jesus gave himself up for us, he took bread …  En la noche en que se entregó por nosotros, Jesús tomó el pan …”

John Fanestil

john6861@sbcglobal.net

January 25 Photos from Karl W Hoffman.   

By Dan Millis, Sierra Club Borderlands Campaign

“Oh my God, I can’t believe they actually painted that on the wall,” I thought to myself. I felt embarrassed for whoever wrote something so crude, and for the dozen or so of us Sierra Club folks who in December came from all across the U.S. to glimpse this – quite literally – obscene border wall.

Deer stranded at border wall in Arizona

We’ve all seen the photo: three mule deer staring blankly at a steel barrier twelve feet high, not far from Arizona’s San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area (SPRNCA). Standing within the Conservation Area itself, our Sierra Club group now stood at the point where the terrain takes a steep plunge into the San Pedro riverbed and the wall abruptly ends. It was us now staring blankly, at white graffiti across twenty feet of rusted steel that reads:

“258^th LAY IT LONG AND HARD”

Lay it long they have, with 526 miles of new border wall and vehicle barriers complete as of December 12 according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Arizona has borne the brunt of this mileage, with 280 miles of barrier laid across our public lands, including fragile national forests, monuments, conservation and wilderness areas.

Barbed wire fence between U.S. and Mexico in San Pedro riverbed, December 6, 2008

And hard? Well, I suppose they did that, too: Former (hooray!) Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Michael Chertoff used the Real ID waiver to ignore more than thirty-five federal laws, including the Clean Water Act, National Environmental Policy Act, and Endangered Species Act, to hastily construct the border wall through sensitive habitats like the SPRNCA.

The border wall through the San Pedro is a sore spot for us at the Sierra Club. In 2007, we joined with Defenders of Wildlife and many other environmental groups to battle DHS, struggling in vain to protect this sensitive habitat. We won a small victory in October of that year when a federal judge granted a temporary restraining order against border wall construction in the SPRNCA, confirming our argument that the government failed to meet its legal obligations. Chertoff responded by invoking Real ID to ignore the federal judge’s decision, waiving decades-worth of federal protection laws, to construct an illegal, immoral, ugly, ineffective, extremely expensive and environmentally devastating border wall through a conservation area.

Normandy-style vehicle barriers in San Pedro riverbed, December 14, 2008

The DHS Secretary is a political appointee. Section 102 of the Real ID Act gives this appointee a waiver authority greater than that of any elected official, even the President. At the Sierra Club we are working hard to repeal Section 102 of the Real ID Act and restore the rule of law. We also call for a moratorium on new border wall construction, as well as funding for mitigation and restoration projects in areas impacted by border infrastructure. We have a Sierra Club Borderlands Campaign website and facebook group, and our new border film, Wild Versus Wall, is popping eyes and dropping jaws.

But we have our work cut out for us. Only a week after our visit to the SPRNCA, four-foot high steel rail vehicle barriers were installed there, extending out from the wall’s terminus down into the San Pedro riverbed itself. There’s no telling what sort of problems this could bring, especially in flood season when walls of water and debris come ripping towards the new, poorly-planned infrastructure.

Despite setbacks like these, there is hope. The Sierra Club Borderlands Team will be there to voice resistance to destructive border policies. People are taking action every day against the obscenity and injustice of the border wall.  High above the macho-man graffiti on the SPRNCA border wall, there is a little bumper sticker with a far loftier message.  Simply, in black-and-white, it says: “NO BORDER WALL.”

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Hello,

My name is Jim Stout and I am the Community Relations Agent for Tucson Station of the Border Patrol which has patrol responsibility for the Arivaca, Sasabe, Green Valley, Sahuarita, Three Points, and Tucson Metro Areas. I don’t want to over run the blog here with Illegal Immigration Issues, but we all know that it is a focal issue at times in the Arivaca Community.

Please feel free to contact me at any of my numbers or e-mail below if you have questions and I will also try to reply when I can to the blog here. Forgive me if it takes a while as I am running all over the place doing the job. If you are so inclined then please feel free to give me a call or e-mail as that may be faster in me responding.

My first 5 years in the Patrol were spent patrolling the many areas we are responsible for to include Arivaca. I have always loved working in the Arivaca area because of the great amount of natural beauty there. I grew up in Southeastern Oklahoma in a little peanut farming town, so Tucson is the biggest town in which I have ever lived. Arivaca often reminds me of the many towns I lived in growing up so it is always a good deal for me to be down there. My father was a fire and brimstone backwoods country preacher so we moved all over rural Oklahoma as I grew up. Farming and cattle country were the name of the game in most of the places in which we lived. We once lived in a little town called Utica, Oklahoma which is no bigger that Arivaca, actually Arivaca is probably bigger. I attended the small elementary school there which was about the size of the Sopori School.

While we were there the government came out with farming subsidies to get the farmers to stop producing so much so that produce could be bought cheaper from overseas sources. This was a very rough time as when the farmers took advantage of those funds they then worked less. Asking a farmer not to farm really can depress them greatly so that was a major issue for my dad to deal with in our churches. So you see I understand that what we do in the federal government can have a very large impact on everyone, this I understand and I would hope that in the end Arivaca fairs well.

So that is part of my story, please contact me if you have any questions and I will do my best to answer them as candidly as possible.

Jim Stout
Senior Patrol Agent/Chaplain
U.S. Border Patrol
Community Relations Office
2430 S Swan Rd
Tucson, Arizona 85711
Office (520) 514-4700
Mobile (520) 349-4670

Comments are always welcome but if you have more to say on a regular basis, Guest Bloggers are also welcome to post their opinions and information related to the genre of this site which will be open to comment. Unfortunately because of spam and unrelated posts or racists comments in the past, there will be a short delay for posts from new bloggers.

In keeping  with my goal, to  fairly represent all aspects of the border arena, I believe that this story gives an insight to a side of the Border Patrol that is not often seen or recognized. Because of media bias, lack of sensationalism or unfortunately does not represent the views of it’s publisher, like The Arivaca Connection, it would never appear in many publications.

Border Patrol Agents Rescue Mother and Newborn

Mother gives Birth in the Desert

TUCSON, Ariz. – Border Patrol Agents from the Douglas Station located and rescued a woman and her newborn son just after she gave birth in the desert ten miles north of Douglas, Ariz.

On December 21st, the Douglas Border Patrol Station received a call from a local resident explaining that ten illegal aliens had arrived at his residence and needed help. Agents arrived at the location and the aliens explained they had left a female behind, who had given birth early that morning and needed medical assistance.

Agents were able to back track the foot sign of the aliens and found the female subject, her husband and a newborn. The Border Patrol Agents on scene were trained as Emergency Medical Technicians and were able to provided intermediate medical aide to the mother and her newborn. Douglas Fire Department Emergency Service arrived on scene and transported the mother and her newborn to a local hospital.

Today, the newborn and mother were transported to a local hospital in Tucson, Ariz. for further medical treatment.

In Fiscal Year 2008, agents of the Tucson Sector were responsible for the rescue of over 400 individuals, in the past two months there has been over 25 rescues. To support humanitarian operations like these, over 35 agents in the Tucson Sector have received advanced medical and rescue training and are members of Border Patrol’s Search Trauma and Rescue or BORSTAR. In addition, 69 agents are State Certified Emergency Medical Technicians (EMT) and are able to triage and administer medical treatment in the field. An additional 20 agents are currently in the process of completing the EMT training program. After an assessment is made, the injured can be transported to nearby medical facilities for further treatment. Tucson Sector remains committed to keeping border safety among our top priorities in our progress toward operational control of our Nation’s borders.