Reviews
Gender Politics in Latin America: Debates in Theory and Practice by Elizabeth Dore (ed.), Monthly Review Press, 1997, 251 pp., S38 (cloth), S18 (paper). This edited volume examines...
...In "Engendering Human Rights," Elizabeth Jelin challenges us to examine the emphasis on the individual in the conventional notion of human rights, the liberal insistence that these rights are universal, and the contradiction between this formulation and the needs of the collective-of women generally, for example, or of ethnic groups and communities...
...the 'illegal alien' is becoming the faceless wraith against whom US...
...For example, at the Port Isabel "Service and Processing Center" in Harlingen-known locally as el corral6n, or the big corral-the INS regularly stripsearched babies and put children in isolation cells for standing too close to windows...
...Calavita also told us that "[u]nlike most other government agencies, the Immigration Service has relinquished virtually no internal documents since World War II to the National Archives in Washington, D.C.," and that the agency has even withdrawn records after they were used for a book of which the agency apparently disapproved...
...Mark Dow...
...Indeed, the text goes beyond formulaic conceptions, enhances our grasp of historical processes, and shows that an important body of thought about gender has been generated in various Latin American contexts...
...This edited volume examines questions of gender in the political, economic and social relations of Latin America today...
...law to discourage them from seeking political asylum...
...citizens will be asked to take a stand...
...Kahn concedes that some cases were a matter of incompetence-as with the interpreter who translated escuadron de la muerte as "death of the squadrons...
...The problem was that, since the Reagan Administration wasn't admitting the existence of U.S.-trained and funded Salvadoran death squads, the INS courts weren't admitting it either...
...With minimal review, asylum-seekers can be turned around at airports and sent home by INS officers, and those allowed to pursue their claims are more likely than ever to be detained...
...Erica G. Polakoff Other People's Blood: U.S...
...lawmakers of both parties continue writing 'tougher' immigration laws, fueling hatred of immigrants, as though the lies, abuses, and murders of the 1980s had never happened and that the violence is not continuing, above all, on the U.S.-Mexican border...
...Five years ago, in an incisive look at the U.S...
...by bureaucrats in judges' robes...than by all the petty muggers and sexual predators in Border Patrol and prison guard uniforms...
...Other People's Blood is chilling as it weaves between the daily humiliations of "indefinite detention"-that's an INS term-and the broader policy-level repression...
...On April 1, 1997, provisions of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 relating to so-called "expedited removal" went into effect...
...One interpreter who simply omitted the words from an applicant's testimony blushed, observes Kahn, when the man's attorney finally shouted, "Death squad...
...The inclusion of materials from several disciplines and across theoretical paradigms provides the reader with a multifaceted approach to questions about the class and gender dimensions of social institutions, political activism and identity...
...In "From Margin to Center," Jean Franco focuses on the ways in which marginalized and delegitimized individuals of both North and South have disrupted mainstream discourse and mainstream politics...
...Prisons are about power," writes Kahn, "and in this demoralizing setting, petty harassment was one of the perks....Virtually every man processed through Los Fresnos immigration prison [el corral6n] was told if he applied for political asylum, he would have to stay in jail for a year or more...
...Kahn demonstrates the conscious implementation of policies intended to deny Central Americans even their right to apply for political asylum here...
...Together, the essays bridge the gap between theory and practice, and between policy and the everyday experiences which our theoretical models seek to explain...
...mistreatment of the thousands of Central American refugees who came to this country fleeing U.S.-sponsored wars at home: "U.S...
...For example, elements considered "private" at one time may be launched into "civil society" or the "public" domain at another...
...In many cases, in fact, women's activities are further restricted, their burdens multiplied, and their power diminished...
...Kahn worked as a legal assistant at Proyecto Libertad in Harlingen, Texas, and as an editor at the Brownsville Herald...
...Those potential refugees who did find their way into a court might also find themselves being taunted by the immigration judges who determined their fate...
...After all, the INS is so absurdly secretive that its spokespeople denied the existence of some of its own memos, even while Kahn held them in his hand...
...Furthermore, it has often been assumed that women's entry into the paid labor force will necessarily empower them as they become increasingly integrated into the "public" sphere...
...One of the central themes that has driven research and scholarship on gender, for example, has been the conceptual separation of social life into public and private spheres, with the public representing the world of politics and economics (presumed, for a very long time, to be the prerogative of men), and the private, representing the home and the family, sexuality and reproduction (allegedly the realm in which women held sway...
...However, as both this essay and Sharon McClenaghan's essay, "Women, Work, and Empowerment: Romanticizing the Reality," point out, research has yielded mixed results...
...The disgraceful INS policies of the Reagan decade turn out to have been only a beginning...
...Both tendencies are worth bearing in mind today...
...bracero program, author Kitty Calavita wrote that former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) Commissioner Joseph Swing admitted-after he resigned -that in the 1950's he had "decentralized the INS and deliberately placed the new [regional offices] in out-of-the-way places in order to make it difficult for immigration lawyers to access them, and to insulate the agency from the input of individual members of Congress...
...There's a good reason this isn't common knowledge...
...With the end of the Cold War," Kahn belatedly observes...
...Kahn criticizes "the lockstep behavior of immigration judges, who systematically violated federal law to deport refugees-many of them to their deaths...
...Needless to say, there are no provisions in the new law for increased accountability...
...In "Public and Private Spheres: The End of Dichotomy," Tessa Cubitt and Helen Greenslade provide an overview of the literature that critically analyzes this conception, and point out the fluidity between these so-called "spheres" for both women and men...
...Immigration Prisons in the Reagan Decade by Robert S. Kahn, Westview Press, 1996, 265 pp., $55 (cloth), $21 (paper...
...The South Texas detention project," he writes, "had two real effects: It swept the refugees from the streets, which made the national and international media lose interest, and it intensified abuses inside Port Isabel prison and in South Texas immigration courts...
...Unfortunately, Khan's account remains all too timely...
...By drawing on historical and literary sources, in addition to political-economic studies of social life, these essays contextualize theoretical debates in Marxism, feminism, and postmodernism around the relationship between gender and politics...
...With Other People's Blood, Robert S. Kahn steps into this troublesome territory with a passionate and meticulous telling of the double-edged story of U.S...
...For instance, "queer theory," which has undermined the previously unchallenged categories of sex, gender, and sexuality, is central to current feminist theorizing in the United States and Latin America...
...As the refugees stood naked with [delousing] chemicals on their genitals, prison guards misinformed them about U.S...
...intervention in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua may be shocked by the related horrors in the detention centers of South Texas, Louisiana, and Arizona...
...In this book, he focuses on the South Texas detention project, which, in 1989 became the Justice Department's "biggest detention project since it had imprisoned Japanese Americans during World War II...
...More harm was done to more refugees...
...Come on, death squad...
...The debate, thankfully, is no longer simply about the relative importance of gender and class...
...Out of context this might sound a bit rhetorical, but consider this: "Not once, in the dozens of [Salvadoran] asylum trials I attended, did I hear an INS translator correctly translate "escuadron de la muerte...
...Readers who know about the history of U.S...
Vol. 31 • September 1997 • No. 2
