As immigration from Mexico to the United States grew through the 1970s
and 1980s, the Border Patrol, police, and other state agents exerted
increasing violence against ethnic Mexicans in San Diego's volatile
border region. In response, many San Diego activists rallied around the
leadership of the small-scale print shop owner Herman Baca in the
Chicano movement to empower Mexican Americans through Chicano
self-determination. The combination of increasing repression and Chicano
activism gradually produced a new conception of ethnic and racial
community that included both established Mexican Americans and new
Mexican immigrants. Here, Jimmy Patino narrates the rise of this
Chicano/Mexicano consciousness and the dawning awareness that Mexican
Americans and Mexicans would have to work together to fight border
enforcement policies that subjected Latinos of all statuses to legal
violence.
By placing the Chicano and Latino civil rights struggle on explicitly
transnational terrain, Patino fundamentally reorients the understanding
of the Chicano movement. Ultimately, Patino tells the story of how
Chicano/Mexicano politics articulated an "abolitionist" position on
immigration--going beyond the agreed upon assumptions shared by liberals
and conservatives alike that deportations are inherent to any solutions
to the still burgeoning immigration debate.