"Migra! is the first and only substantive history of the U.S. Border Patrol. Hernandez breaks new ground in this deeply researched account of its formation and development."--George Sanchez, author of Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945

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.

In 1979, Mexican President José López Portilla assured his compatriots that the prosperity of the petroleum boom would reach every corner of the Republic of Mexico. The mother of the narrator in the first passage asks, "Do you believe what the president says?" The young narrator listens agape at the president's statements, while his work-weary parents contemplate a trip to el Norte. When the promised prosperity doesn't reach the corners of San Luis Potosí, the narrator sets out with his father to try to improve their finances. With the dream of the wealthy Hollywood that he sees on television tucked in his pocket, he, along with the other narrators in this collection of Spanish language testimonials, struggles to reach the United States. Radio personality Alicia Alarcón invited listeners who had migrated to the United States to call and share their stories. In these pages, Alarcón collects the footsteps of these travelers, through their flight and their falls. Their stories highlight the true American experience for immigrants from all over South and Central America who decide to leave their respective homelands. These intriguing but heartbreaking passages reveal young and old, men and women, who must overcome the impossible as they hope to find a better place than the one they've left behind. These difficult and gritty stories are the stories of the successful, the ones who make it across, past the natural and the bureaucratic obstacles along the border, only to scratch together lives on the other side.

The first ever graphic novel by political cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz blends political satire with the border icons from his youth and the fabricated good ole days' of official American TV culture. Through humorous and occasionally poignant stories relating to the author's childhood as the son of Mexican immigrants living on the US/Mexico border, Leave It to Beaner explores themes of immigration, biculturalism and the inevitable reverse-assimilation of America.'

Los Angeles incarcerates more people than any other city in the United States, which imprisons more people than any other nation on Earth. This book explains how the City of Angels became the capital city of the world's leading incarcerator. Marshaling more than two centuries of evidence, historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez unmasks how histories of native elimination, immigrant exclusion, and black disappearance drove the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles. In this telling, which spans from the Spanish colonial era to the outbreak of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, Hernandez documents the persistent historical bond between the racial fantasies of conquest, namely its settler colonial form, and the eliminatory capacities of incarceration. But City of Inmates is also a chronicle of resilience and rebellion, documenting how targeted peoples and communities have always fought back. They busted out of jail, forced Supreme Court rulings, advanced revolution across bars and borders, and, as in the summer of 1965, set fire to the belly of the city. With these acts those who fought the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles altered the course of history in the city, the borderlands, and beyond. This book recounts how the dynamics of conquest met deep reservoirs of rebellion as Los Angeles became the City of Inmates, the nation's carceral core. It is a story that is far from over.