The Shadow of El Centro: A History of Migrant Incarceration and Solidarity

Abstract

Located in California's southeastern corner, the city of El Centro sits in the mountainous desert of the Imperial Valley. It was home to the El Centro Immigrant Detention Center, “one of the oldest continuously operating detention centers in the United States (until recently)” (3). Despite its long history, little was documented of the detention facility in local archives. For Jessica Ordaz, this forgetting was representative of a larger historical erasure that masked violence against migrants under Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) custody. Her book aims to unpack the history of an otherwise buried yet important federal facility. Across seven chapters, Ordaz looks within the El Centro Immigrant Detention Center, from its origins in 1945 to its closing in 2014, to uncover state practices of migrant labor exploitation and punishment, and in turn she reveals migrant resistance as transnational radical solidarity.Ordaz's central claim is that the El Centro Immigration Detention Center was not simply an administrative site to hold and process unauthorized migrants but “a racialized and gendered administrative regime of punishment” (94). She documents how migrants in the facility faced physical and verbal abuse, experienced psychological intimidation, endured overcrowding, and suffered solitary confinement. They were denied lifesaving medical services, basic recreation, and adequate nutrition. Their confinement, she argues, was designed to be punitive, a claim that resonates with the work of Miroslava Chávez-García and Natalie Lira, both of whom analyze racialized punishment through the lens of juvenile detention and sterilization in California. Ordaz further situates her analysis of racialized punishment within the context of wartime mobilization. She reviews how World War II, the Cold War, and the civil wars in Latin America armed INS officials with the rhetoric to frame migrants as a threat to the nation and, consequently, legitimized migrant incarceration, which allowed the state to expand detention and deportation infrastructures.Most histories on twentieth-century US immigration enforcement generally center on law and policy, the Border Patrol, or immigrant inspection at ports of entry. While these works provide a brief discussion of migrant detention, few fully unpack its significance. Instead, Ordaz demonstrates that detention facilities were a key mechanism in a larger system of labor exploitation. It was no coincidence, she points out, that the El Centro Immigration Detention Camp was built just three years after the 1942 creation of the Bracero Program, a binational program where the United States issued short-term labor contracts to Mexican workers. Ordaz argues that the El Centro Immigration Detention Camp and the Bracero reception center were two sides of the same coin: both “agricultural growers and INS employees viewed Mexican migrant workers, regardless of their legal status, as a source of labor and profit” (37). According to Ordaz, Bracero workers and detained migrants fell victim to the whims of employers or INS agents, as they both faced similar experiences with immobility, inadequate medical care, harsh labor conditions, and food vulnerability. The larger system made them interchangeable; Bracero and detained migrants were necessary to maintain a reserve of labor that was “racialized as nonhuman, criminal, and disposable” (30). This is of special significance in a space like Imperial Valley, where corporate agriculture holds political sway. Dichotomies can be deceptive, and in this way, Ordaz is in conversation with historian Cristina Salinas, who demonstrates that immigration restriction and unregulated mobility were not incongruent policies but functioned simultaneously as a deliberate tool of the state to control migrant labor.Punitive practices did not go unchallenged. To trace this history, Ordaz examines internal correspondence, handbooks, and investigations within the INS, along with news reports, original oral histories, advocacy group materials, and migrant testimonies collected by legal defense officers. She documents how in the early years of the camp's history, “detained migrants collaborated and thoroughly planned their escapes” (42). Ordaz frames these escapes as a form of migrant politics, protesting and straining the system of containment through their mobility. By the mid-1970s and into the mid-1980s, detained migrants in El Centro began to engage in what Ordaz calls “transnational migrant politics, a set of strategies and solidarities used by migrant prisoners to resist state power” (4). For example, drawing on activist traditions from their home countries, migrant prisoners across the political spectrum joined in collective action to organize a hunger strike protesting conditions at El Centro on May 27, 1985. Ordaz describes how, due to the political and economic upheaval in Latin America and a US refugee policy that excluded people fleeing right-wing regimes, asylum seekers were forced into detention at El Centro, where their extended incarceration set the stage for organized activism.Ordaz weaves together immigration history and carceral studies to trace the geographies of violence that permeated migrant confinement. She draws attention to the spatial dynamics of racialized punishment within and beyond detention. She considers the prefabricated buildings that initially formed the El Centro Detention Camp in 1945 and highlights their connection to a larger history of militarization. She then explores the physical and psychological violence perpetrated in the hidden spaces of detention—bathrooms and isolation rooms—in the latter half of the 1980s. The period between could have benefited from her attentive analysis of space. For example, a map that details the geographical distribution of all service and nonservice detention facilities across the greater Southwest could illustrate her argument that detention shifted largely to the US-Mexico border after 1954. Furthermore, a comprehensive discussion of the expanded facility in 1971 could have highlighted the structural attributes of racialized punishment. Regardless, The Shadow of El Centro will serve well in an undergraduate class because it touches on a wide range of subjects—immigration, labor, incarceration, policing, and migrant activism—in an accessible manner.