Guest commentary: Mexico — U.S. San Ysidro Border

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By Armando Vazquez / Guest contributor

It began innocently enough. A very young Chicano couple take a one day trip to Tijuana. The young brother is trying to impress his girlfriend; he even agrees to take the girlfriends very spoiled baby bother along. Oh man! but what can a brother do? So off we go the three of us for a day of sightseeing, exploring all the taquerias we can find, haggling with the vendors, sitting on that stupid donkey that is painted like a Zebra, and then getting back before night fall. A piece of cake!

On our return to Cali, the migra ask for our papers; as he mad dogs us, and then proceeds to rip our ID’s from my hand. He reviews the two drivers’ license and the kid’s birth certificate like they are cryptic classified state documents written in a foreign language.

As he is casing the inside of the car and handing the documents back to me he asks.”What do you have to declare?”

“Nothing sir” I reply clearly, respectfully and honestly. The response was not good enough for him. He orders me out of the car; behind a mile of cars fume their contempt.

As I am getting out of the car the migra has opened the backdoor of the car. He is now scaring the shit out of both my girlfriend and her baby brother. He grabs a small plain brown paper bag that rests next to the kid; who is now frozen in terror, only a second from screaming bloody murder. The migra doesn’t give a shit.

“What are you do…” before I can finish my sentence the migra is on me, his thick hairy left arm around my neck. He is choking the life out of me and he rips me from off the ground with one violent yank for good measure. The paper bag falls on the pavement, out spills a small amount of firecrackers.

“Firecrackers!” is all that flashes through my head as it is ready to explode. Suddenly the goon releases his death grip and slams me on the hood of my car. My girlfriend is now screaming to the migra. “Stop it, stop it, you’re killing him”, she is hysterical. The little boy is screaming at the top of his lungs. Behind us are a million cars and one dares gets out of their cars.  Another goon rushes in and joins the assault; they toss and punch me back and forth over the hood of the car like I am a ragged doll. Suddenly, they come to their senses as they see me bleeding from my mouth and blood streaming from a nasty gash over my right eyebrow. The assault complete, one of goon’s walks up to me as I am draped over the hood of my car and spits into my face, “Get in the car and get the fuck out of here before I kill you”.

I jump in the car and drive away seething in anger and shame.  I am beaten to a pulp, emasculated and degraded before my girl, the kid, and a million witnesses that see nothing.. She cries all the home, the little boy remains curled in the back seat of the car.  In frozen terror he will not come to the front seat.

The incident is never discussed, ever! What was there to say but that I got my ass kicked by the migra. At least I wasn’t killed.

That is how we always began our police brutality story back in our barrio of San Fernando and Pacoima as adventuresome youth in the 1960’s, “At least the jura did kill you” was the universal refrain. A severe ass beating, a couple of broken ribs, chipped or broken teeth in an apparent routine police encounter that broke bad when we did not comply quickly enough for them. Well hell, we would lament,  after such encounter with the cops, we got off damned easy.

We all lived in mortal fear of the cops, we were natural unquestioned enemies; us and the cops, that the way it was there was no other way period! We did not hurt cops, much less kill cops; and even if one of the homies had the stupid mendacity to lie and say that he had kicked a cop’s ass no one believed him. We always lost, and lost badly! No one ever kicked a cops’ ass, they have always had the guns, the toys, the numbers and the full power of the law in their corner; a young loco never ever had a chance.  Fuck with the jura and you die.

This is the way it has always been in poor neighborhood of color throughout this nation, mortal fear of the cops. They will kill you.

This is what Mark Naison, a white New Yorker writers is the current policing climate in his city, “All over New York, for the past 10 years, an armies of police have roamed through the city stopping young men of color hundreds of thousands of times, allegedly in the search for guns and drugs, even though less than 5% of the stops find anything illegal. It is hard to find a young Black and Latino male from the Bronx, or Southeast Queens, who has not been “stopped and frisked” numerous times, a ritual that is frightening, humiliating, and filled with a message that they are viewed as an object of fear by city officials. This can happen to them outside their apartment building or school, in the subway, or when they are shopping or going to play ball. The awareness of this possibility hovers over them like a bad dream.

Worse yet, virtually all of the high schools they attend now have metal detectors, so going to school now involves the virtual equivalent of passing through airport security! After worrying about being searched by police going to school, they find themselves searched by police IN SCHOOL—a process made more likely because more and more schools now have students arrested for disciplinary issues that were once handled in-house by school personnel, such as cursing out a teacher, refusing to remove a hat, or shoving another student.

What we are talking about here is something utterly unprecedented in the history of New York and perhaps American urban history—the militarization of entire neighborhoods so that young people of color feel vulnerable to search and seizure and physical abuse every time they step outside of their place of residence. This smothering, stifling police presence is THEIR REALITY, something they deeply resent not only for the fear it inspires, but for the message it sends about what the rest of the city and the rest of the nation thinks of them that is why they rise up in anger when someone unarmed who looks like them is killed by police. They see themselves in Eric Garner and Michael Brown and the long list of other victims of police violence.

And they feel no gratitude toward the public officials (or the 1% cacique, my note) who has given police license to control every inch of space in their communities—at their expense.

At our expense, our communities of color and poverty here in Oxnard, Ventura County, along the Mexico-United States border, and throughout this nation is over run by cops that conduct their often illegal and brutal police “work” with impunity. The cops serve only one master and that master today in America is the mad cow pathetically irrational  fear that the 1% caciques have engendered in their greedy minds and hearts. The madness scream to then the people of color are at your door, lynch ropes in hand and will do exactly to you what you have been doing to us since this nation was founded. To that I say your hatred and guilty will not infect us, nor destroy us; in fact our love in the face of this brutality is your only hope, your salvation. As James Baldwin put it, “Next time the Fire!” Wake up America before it is too late!