"Moving On" from the Ongoing: Stephon Clark, Frank Alvarado, and State Violence in California (original) (raw)

TRIGGERING CHANGE: Police Homicides, Community Healing, and the Emergent Eventfulness of the New Civil Rights

In the spring and summer of 2014, both before and after ‘Ferguson’, four police officer-involved shootings of unarmed Latino men occurred in the often-criminalized, and mostly-Mexican, enclave of East Salinas, California. These deaths at the hands of state agents sparked significant ‘triggers’ for many locals – knee-jerk reactions to present stimuli in relation to difficult and diffuse past experiences – generating unprecedented, and sometimes unacknowledged, affective and ethical responses among those who have long abided countless unresolved gang-related deaths in the city. Official downplaying of the deaths as something that “never happens here” stood in contrast to resident responses stressing the ongoing, if less overt, happening of state disregard. Such disparity, as registered in many East Salinans’ triggers, indicates the relative ‘eventfulness’ of state violence that is both slow and ongoing, in addition to occasionally spectacular, in criminalized communities in late liberal America. A term imported from psychology in the general mainstreaming of discourses of trauma, triggers are conceptualized here instead as socially generated and ethically generative, a way of marking and making time and transforming the systematic exhaustion of criminalized life into a political resource. Tracing these temporal tripwires ethnographically in East Salinas, in light of a local social project of healing, illuminates the affective and ethical impetus to both political engagement and disengagement in persistently criminalized communities of color as they encounter police homicides and state violence, refracting the proliferating project of ‘Lives Mattering’.

"You Don't Know That" : Refusals of Community Policing and Criminalization in California

When a community policing program named Why'd You Stop Me (WYSM) was implemented in Salinas, California, in 2016, a result of a series of police homicides of local Latino men 2 years prior, residents of this persistently crim-inalized Mexican-American community insistently refused it. Rather than accepting WYSM's securitized logic and affirming their own potential criminality, in their refusals and a series of related public actions, residents rendered legible the program's role in the lethal process of criminalization. While community policing strategies are often upheld as viable and empathic solutions for repairing fraught relations between officers and distrustful communities, they form a critical part of counterinsurgency tactics and occupy a key surveillance role in America's militarized and racialized policing project. America's racial empathy gap, as black feminist epistemologists have argued, is better conceived as an epistemology gap, an ignorance and unwillingness to know or accept as legitimate the experiences of communities of color both underserved and under siege by the state. This paper thus considers Salinans' refusals as epistemological interventions, activist attempts to make palpable the production of criminalization—including in its occasional masquerading as empathy—in the efforts of decriminalizing residents and building a healthy, livable community. " If We Know It Is Possible, Why Wouldn't We Search? " Jason Lehman is a big-necked, burly man of a cop. He pointed a gun to my friend Shi's head. It was during a training session he implemented numerous times in and around Salinas, a majority Mexican-American city in California, to audiences of high school students and community organizers on his community policing program, " Why'd You Stop Me ". His gun—a fake—and its holster—a real one, made by " a bad guy in prison with the intention of killing a cop when he got out " —figure strongly in the four-hour training in which Lehman barks, banters, and role-plays the various aspects of community policing. He models the decisions involved in stopping and searching someone, demonstrating law enforcement's epistemic production of possibility and certainty, so that students and community members can realize how difficult this job is (Figure 1).

Performing the State's Desire Th e Border Industrial Complex and the Murder of Anastasio Hernández Rojas

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 2022

Th is paper considers the 2010 murder of Anastasio Hernández Rojas at the hands of Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in order to unsettle the dominant narrative that migrant desire is responsible for the state violence against undocumented migrants at the border. Instead, I argue that we might read encounters between the state and migrants as performances in which the state and its agents reveal their own desires to enact the force of the border industrial complex, the increasingly privatized and militarized policing behemoth that targets racialized migrant threats for violence while increasing profi ts for US-owned corporations. Th is paper examines the state's performance of violence in three scenes-Hernández Rojas's detection in the desert, his processing at the detention center, and his brutal beating at the scene of deportation. In each scene, agents perform the state's entangled desires: the desire for and construction of a threatening enemy and the desire for total domination of this enemy at the border.

Swarm of earthquakes, #Wandalismo and anticorruption mobilizations in Puerto Rico: Latinx criminology and state crimes

Latino Studies

A 6.4 magnitude earthquake struck Puerto Rico on 7 January 2020, adding a new episode to the multilayered political, economic, and humanitarian crisis affecting the island since 2006. This article demonstrates how the recovery efforts and management of the emergency constitute a state crime. The analysis draws from governmental and journalistic investigation and engages with legal and critical discourse analysis to provide a criminological and sociolegal analysis of state crimes in Puerto Rico-which feature prominently in US colonial and racialized history and anticorruption policies in PR-and of the genealogy of colonial violence that generates these and other legalized and state-facilitated harms. The article analyzes legally contrived states of exception and executive orders used to manage the earthquake emergency, the cases of corruption and criminal negligence (so salient in the public conscience that structural critiques of incompetent, unethical, and extractive governance have been coalesced by popular movements under the hashtag #wandalismo), the legislative public hearing on the case of the government hoarding and stalling distribution of disaster supplies, and the anticorruption mobilizations of January 2020. The article articulates the timeliness and urgency of prioritizing research and theorizing of state crimes within the burgeoning field of Latina/o/x criminology.

Book Review: Monica Munoz Martinez. The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2018

NETSOL: New Trends in Social and Liberal Sciences, 2020

With the strong and gripping title of the book, it is only fitting that Martinez starts off her work with a strong introduction. As she introduces the main themes of the book, she first starts off by describing a normal day in Cameron County in 1918. Miguel Garcia, a cattle rancher in South Texas, has not heard or seen his son, Florencio, and begins to worry for his safety. Martinez writes about the search Garcia carried on for his son and how he ended up finding his son's remains in the Texas brush; he suspected that his son was killed by the Texas Rangers (p. 1-3). This gripping introduction makes the following themes of the book easy to introduce. In this book, Martinez argues that the border region of Texas was founded violently by state policing with the use of strong beliefs of nation building and racial superiority. Violent intimidation, racial profiling, and murders were ways that the Texas Rangers, local law enforcement, Anglo citizens, and the State of Texas used to settle south and west Texas. Considering these facts, this book is a social history as it explores the social relations between Anglos, ethnic Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and African Americans. Martinez's purpose is not only to provide a history of the anti-Mexican violence and the state's role in it, but also to highlight the resistance that families took after violence struck their families in the form of vernacular histories and non-traditional historical publications like blogs, personal archives, oral histories, and personal research. Martinez acknowledges that without these non-traditional histories, her own book would not have been written. Additionally, the reason that the State of Texas now acknowledges these crimes, is because

Police, Politics and the Immigration-Crime Nexus (Table of contents/Tabla de contenidos)

Police, Politics and the Immigration-Crime Nexus , 2023

This book examines the relationship between immigration, crime, police and politics in the city of Buenos Aires during the Cambiemos ("Let's Change") administration, which took place in Argentina between 2015 and 2019. It draws on semi-structured interviews with migrants to offer insights into interactions between police and migrants, narratives of police violence, police attitudes towards migrants, the nexus between police and politics and the perception of the vulnerability of the migratory community of belonging to police action. Using a mixed methods approach, it also draws on secondary quantitative data regarding police practices of detention of migrants and examines political discourses around the immigration-crime association. In essence, it discusses the changes in attitude of the police towards different ethnic-national groups during the administration Cambiemos. In this sense, it presents empirical research and methodological insights from the Global South.