As the United States closes in on the 2008 presidential election, immigration has become one of the key issues at the forefront of the political debate. Immigration has remained a hot topic in the media, especially since the failure of President Bush’s June 2007 immigration reform legislation.
During this time, media on both sides of the United States-Mexico border provided stories, editorials, position papers and narratives about the trials, tribulations, successes and heartbreaks of people who have entered the United States.
Those stories, and their impact on the people of the United States and Mexico, have been under the legal microscope of UNM Law professors Antoinette Sedillo Lopez and Gloria Valencia-Weber.
In mid-July, the pair went to London to present their research at the Once Upon a Legal Time: Developing the Skills of Storytelling in Law Conference. Their upcoming paper, entitled Immigration Stories and Narratives in Mexico and the United States: Framing Rhetoric and Realities, will draw upon research done since this presentation, focusing on additional stories to come out of the United States and Mexico.
This project began when Professor Sedillo Lopez noticed the different tone of immigration stories during her two summers teaching at UNM’s Guanajuato Summer Law Institute in Guanajuato, Mexico.
“I was listening to stories in the media during the 2006 Mexican Presidential Election,” Sedillo Lopez said. “The rhetoric used in Mexico about immigration, or more appropriately called migración (migration), was so different and I began collecting those stories.”
After collecting these stories Sedillo Lopez and Valencia-Weber began studying the use of language and mental images to provide the immigration narratives used on both sides of the border. Among their findings were stories about immigration in the United States have been inconsistent – on one hand immigrants were seen as taking jobs from Americans, but on the other hand they were doing jobs that Americans did not want to do.
Another aspect of the immigration and border issues that Prof’s Sedillo Lopez and Valencia-Weber studied was the oft-missed issue of transnational tribes – those Native Americans whose land crosses the U.S.-Mexico border.
One example of this was the story of Pablo Lewis of the Tohono O’odham tribe. Lewis, a former U.S. marine who served in World War II, could not prove his U.S. citizenship because he was born on Tohona O’odham land in Mexico.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security requires members of these tribes to get passports and provide additional documentation of their legal status – previously only tribal documentation was necessary. This tightening of the border has put additional stress on their lives.
“We’re not talking about once-a-year trips,” Valencia-Weber said. “This impacts people going to school, visits to health facilities, to perform cultural ceremonies on sacred sites. This is everyday life for them.”