Zack de la Rocha, vocalist of Rage Against the Machine and activist for the Zapatista Army of National Liberation.

The political, social, and legal backlash upon Mexican-American immigrants by the United States government has led to the dawn of one of the most controversial and pivotal philosophical conundrums in the history of contemporary humanity. Over time, the issue of immigration and the perception of a need for reform has led to attempts to undermine efforts of immigrant assimilation, appalling levels of human exploitation, and the nationalist view that Latin or Asian immigrants are less worthy of citizenship than the colonial Europeans who initially claimed ownership of the land that was once inhabited by Native Americans. The truths and argumentative strategies of each side of the argument are fueled by varying mixtures of financial motivation, political principles, and racial hatred. Not only has this conflict made possible, due to massive political support, the passing of some of the most unethical, racially-underscored legislation to grace the desks of United States legislators in the twenty-first century, but it has also sparked an impassioned protest of the discriminatory political backlash from Chicano artists, photographers, and forward-thinking musicians.

It has been observed that the United States “is a nation of immigrants” (Brugge). In fact, with the exception of the indigenous Native Americans whose displacement was the result of European colonialism and the archaic perception of white supremacy, the country is comprised entirely of immigrants. At its founding, the motivational factor for immigration into the U.S. was the existence of an open frontier; the possibilities for imperial expansion and the prospect of escaping political tyranny or persecution was readily accessible, if one had only the means of travel (Brugge).

With the rise of the industrial revolution, however, began one of the most paradoxical and complicated aspects of American prejudice. Due to the cheapness of immigrant labor, and the increasing need for a vast industrial labor force, migrant workers flooded the country in the nineteenth century, seeking political sanctuary and the promise of beginning anew in a land perceived as one of glorified liberty and apparently boundless opportunity. This era saw the most extreme cases of human exploitation in documented United States history. Laborers were granted jobs under the most preposterous of conditions; they were not allowed ownership of any property whatsoever, thereby denying them the right to vote, and they were in many cases made to pledge portions of the wages over to the companies in return for employment. This also led to the firing of higher-paid employees and rampant workers’ strikes, which in turn led to violence throughout the industrial American labor force (Brugge). This exemplifies an American tendency to allow periods of mass immigration coinciding with rising tides of economic growth. The argument for anti-immigrant movements in such times rely on the notion that this causes a devaluing of labor, a lowering of wages, and the replacement of U.S. laborers with immigrants, who are perceived as more willing to work for less pay. In the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S. by al-Qaeda, this argument was allowed to resurface offhandedly, or perhaps deliberately, by U.S. officials. When former President George W. Bush proposed the statement that “Either you are with us, or against us,” various other members of the government asserted that combating terrorist entry into the United States must begin at the borders, not excluding the one shared with Mexico, despite Mexico having no association whatsoever with the attack on the World Trade Center (Barry). President Bush also became an earnest proponent of the “guest worker” provisional program, which aimed to grant immigrants the right to work in the U.S. while simultaneously denying them the likelihood of ever gaining legal U.S. citizenship (Brugge).

Race is, logically, and unfortunately, the greatest observable factor weighing on the issue of immigration into the U.S. In 1900, 85 percent of all total immigrants originated from Europe, whereas today, non-European immigrants comprise at least two-thirds of all immigrants entering into the United States (Brugge). This presents the ongoing retroactive argument, insidious and insubstantial as it is, that the massive numbers of immigrants allowed into the United States early in its history were justifiable due to their racial background, while those not perceived as equal to those who first settled the U.S. are more easily turned away from a nationalist (borderline fascist) argument, upon which centuries-old arguments for Social Darwinism and the essence of racism mostly relied. More contemporary right-wing arguments pose the notion that the nation has so many internal problems, that the limiting of immigrant influx is a necessary step toward bettering the nation’s sociopolitical and economic state. The most logical right-wing extremist argument is that despite its past helpfulness, due to a slow of economic growth and the current population size, immigration is no longer a beneficial factor or the repair of the crippled economy and political instability which the United States is currently facing (Brugge). This mentality was presented by the “carrying-capacity” movements of the 1970s, which applied biological principles to humanitarian issues (a form of Social Darwinism, essentially), and also more recently in the form of former President George W. Bush’s “War on Terror,” which was implemented in conjunction with various controversial measures said to be necessary for protection and preservation of the United States, which he named the “USA PATRIOT Act” (Barry).

Anti-immigrant groups such as FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, advocate well-funded campaigns that suggest that constant immigration at its current rate has created the possibility of a separatist America, not unlike the North/South division of the nation during the American Civil War. They argue that the Mexican migrant workers that reside in the U.S. presently come and go at such a rate that they do not find it necessary to make an effort to assimilate, and therefore threaten to fragment United States society. Of course, one could easily argue that this sort of thing is merely a result of the gradual liberalization of American politics over the past century and a less hypocritical general public opinion regarding immigrant culture (Brugge).

Another important aspect in the argument concerning immigration and assimilation into European-American culture is in regards to the perceived possibility of English being overrun as the primary language of the United States. While this is made to appear as a movement toward requiring immigrants to learn English, there is in fact a much more insidious agenda underlying organizations such as Engish Only, which places legal restrictions upon the placement of non-English language in public places and advocates political cutbacks on adult English education programs (Ochoa). This leaves immigrants unable to easily access bilingual education, making the process either unaffordable or too tedious to seem plausible; the result is a sense of inferiority and the ability of U.S. officials to more easily ignore the efforts of those immigrants who do, in fact, desire to learn English (Brugge).

In this era of resurfacing anti-immigrant campaigning, Latino artists have been seen as taking a great amount of the resultant burden, sending an unconscious message to the public that celebrities of their corresponding ethnic groups are no more wanted in the United States than the poor Mexican-American immigrants at present. In 2007, a U.S. bookstore canceled Mexican-American author Reyna Grande’s book-signing, as it was in support of her first novel, Across a Hundred Mountains, which was perceived as pro-illegal immigrant propaganda. That same year, a film titled “Deep in the Heart of Texas,” starring Eva Longoria in her portrayal of an assimilated Mexican-American women, was put on permanent hold and never released, due to the way in which her Latina character was received; she was claimed to be far too “American” in her portrayal. In 2008, People magazine reported a drop in sales by more than 100,000 when they featured Latina singer Christina Aguilera on its cover. Jennifer Lopez’s 2007 film “Bordertown,” which is about serial killings of Mexican women near the U.S.-Mexican border, was viewed as anti-NAFTA, and resultantly denied release in the United States. Also in 2007, the immensely popular sitcom The George Lopez Show was inexplicably canceled, immediately replaced by a failed sitcom about cavemen. Furthermore, it has been reported by studies that Latin-Americans are generally underrepresented throughout American media, and that Latinas are almost unanimously portrayed as “exotic, sexually hot, passionate ‘spitfires’,” (Valdes-Rodriguez) while Latino men in the media are most frequently only present as a means of comic relief; therefore, neither gender is generally given a fully-realized characterization, but instead degraded to archetypal caricatures. This corporate punishment of Latin-American celebrities and artists has been attributed to the increasing support for the U.S. anti-immigrant movement. (Valdes-Rodriguez).

With the raging debates within United States sociopolitical circles, the fine art and popular that reacts to this topic often goes unappreciated. Many critics, however, assert that it is immigrant art that will be future of contemporary art as represented by such prestigious centers as the Queens Museum of Art in New York and the San Jose Museum of Art in California (Beattie).

One immensely influential and artistically sound example of reactionary art centered around Mexican-U.S. immigrant debate is the Brazilian photojournalist Sebastiao Salgado. He is considered “[a] humanist who conveys his feelings with powerful, beautiful photographs [...] [who] has revealed a world of human despair [...]” (Masters of Photography). His goal as an artist is to illuminate the humanistic values of various Latin-American and African cultures and then to make their struggles known to a world which often neglects to acknowledge such strife (Masters of Photography). Eduardo Galeano writes in his book An Uncertain Grace that “light is a secret buried under the garbage and Salgado’s photographs tell us that secret.” He explains that “[t]he emergence of the image from the waters of the developer, when the light becomes forever fixed in shadow, is a unique moment that detaches itself from time and is transformed forever. These photographs will live on after their subjects and their author, bearing testimony to the world’s naked truth and hidden splendor. Salgado’s camera moves about the violent darkness, seeking light, stalking light. Does the light descend from the sky or rise out of us? That instant of trapped light that gleams in the photographs reveals to us what is unseen, what is seen but unnoticed; an unperceived presence, a powerful absence. It shows us that concealed within the pain of living and the tragedy of dying there is a potent magic, a luminous mystery that redeems the human adventure in the world” (Galeano). That unperceived presence is almost certainly connoting humanity, or “oneness,” a virtue nearly nonexistent in the politics and social mood of America’s foreigner/immigrant relations. One of Salgado’s images, perhaps the most powerful and evocative of all his photographs, is one depicting two poor rural Mexican adolescents, their hands upraised and pressing exhaustively against the tall and overbearing presence of the border’s divisive wall. Image is one of total isolation, poverty, and desperation; yet in it is that unassuming light of hope which Galeano has mentioned resides in each of Salgado’s works. He has also taken a great many photographs of poor rural Mexican-border villages, and the saddening conditions in which they are forced to live. His skills of lighting, composition, and the subtleties of his artistic message are signs of complete and utter mastery.

Another notable voice in the realm of immigration reform protestation is an unlikely, but nevertheless extremely powerful one: that of garage-rock icon Jack White, guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter for the enormously influential band “The White Stripes.” While he is infamously known for spreading the sort of fabricated myths that comprise any rock and roll musician’s history, it is known that the rock and roll guitar player grew up amid the predominantly (or “almost entirely,” as he claims) Mexican-American population of southwest Detroit, Michigan. He explains that he was exposed constantly to a culture that he otherwise might not have been all that familiar with; every individual in his neighborhood listened to either traditional Mexican popular music or “Chicano rap,” making him feel very alienated, “the only white boy in town–and definitely the only one listening to rock music” (White). The title track from the White Stripes’ sixth album, 2007′s Icky Thump, is the penultimate anthem for the Mexican-American mentality toward anti-immigrant backlash and politics. Infused with somewhat Latin-inspired not-so-atmospheric bagpipes, with blues-derived guitar playing that can only be described as explosively loud and almost violent, the song tackles the hypocrisy of American anti-immigrant movements head-on: “White Americans, what? / Nothing better to do? / Why don’t you kick yourself out / You’re an immigrant too? / Who’s using who? / What should we do? / Well, you can’t be a pimp / And a prostitute too” (WhiteStripes.com). While seemingly obvious and straight-forward, the message of the lyrics is fairly deep it its informativeness. Besides calling out the logical argument that nearly every citizen of the United States is of foreign ancestry, White also addresses the conundrum of corporate influence on the influx of immigration; indeed, the manufacturing giants residing within the United States, as well as those within Mexico or along the U.S.-Mexico border, rely heavily on the labor of Mexican migrant workers. Without them, such corporations would be hard-pressed to find an adequate workforce. Therefore, White’s issue is not so heavily weighted by the laughably obvious initial argument, but rather by the yin-and-yang relationship of white-collar, right-wing conservatives’ political opinions and those of the American corporate elite.

Chicano artists often cite “Chicano rap” as the most powerful expression of Mexican-American identity. Zack de la Rocha, vocalist for the radically leftist, politically-charged rap-rock band “Rage Against the Machine,” is of Mexican, Irish, and German descent, and therefore expresses strong feelings and artistic sensibilities in regards to anti-immigrant groups. His father, a Chicano muralist, was a member of the “Los Four,” the only Mexican group to ever be featured in an exhibition at the Los Angeles Art Museum. De la Rocha is a long-time member of the “Zapatista Army of National Liberation,” or EZLN, which is a group dedicated to the advancement of a very impoverished, indigenous population in southern Mexico. Of his motivation for such activism, de la Rocha explains “[i]t is important for me, as a popular artist, to make clear to the governments of the United States and Mexico that despite the strategy of fear and intimidation to foreigners, despite their weapons, despite their immigration laws and military reserves, they will never be able to isolate the Zapatista communities from the people in the United States” (De la Rocha). This struggled is most appropriately expressed in the 2000 Rage Against the Machine song “War Within a Breath,” from the album The Battle of Los Angeles. More recently, de la Rocha has been seen most prominently as a protestor of the Arizona legislation put forth by Phoenix, AZ Sheriff Joe Arpaio, which states that any lawman who suspects an individual might reasonably be suspected of being an illegal immigrant may be asked to present legal documentation proving otherwise. De la Rocha has appeared in a Public Service Announcement declaring the injustice of such legislation, and in February 2009 performed a solo acoustic concert of Rage Against the Machine songs in Phoenix at the National Day Laborer Organizing Network’s anti-Arpaio rally. He proclaimed the legislation campaign to be “a terror campaign that Mr. Arpaio is waging [...] keeping people in the shadows” (Lemons).

Ultimately, the crisis of U.S./Mexican relations and immigration policy remains an ongoing struggle for balance, liberty, and ethical agreement. Due to the spectacle that the media continues to make of anti-immigrant groups and the opposing arguments framing the issue, the level of violence and political tendencies toward the extreme will only heighten until a breaking point is reached. Whatever the outcome, whatever so-called “rights” are either granted or infringed upon, it can be seen as pure certainty that art will continue to react to the strife of Mexican immigrants, and that if any truth is ever to be found in humanity, it is to be found in art.

Works Cited

Barry, Tom. “Anti-Immigrant Backlash on the ‘Home Front’.” NACLA Report on the Americas (2005): 28-41. Academic Search Premier. 26 April 2010. Web.

Beattie, Rich. “Immigrant Art Exhibitions: Insights of Passage.” The New York Times on the Web. 19 May 2006. 26 April 2010. Web.

Brugge, Doug. “Pulling Up the Ladder: The Anti-Immigrant Backlash.” The Website of Political Research Associates. 1995. 26 April 2010. Web.

De la Rocha, Zack. “Interview with Zack, from Chiapas, Mexico.” Accion Zapatista de Austin. 7 July 1998. 26 April 2010. Web.

Galeano, Eduardo. An Uncertain Grace. Aperture, 2005. Masters of Photography. 26 April 2010. Web.

“Icky Thump (White).” WhiteStripes.com. 26 April 2010. Web.

Lemons, Stephen. “Rage Against the Machine’s Zack de la Rocha Rocks Tonatierra.” Phoenix New Times. 28 February 2009. 26 April 2010. Web.

Ochoa, Gilda Laura. “Mexican Americans’ Attitudes Toward and Interactions with Mexican Immigrants.” Social Science Quarterly, University of Texas Press (2000): 84-105. Academic Search Premier. 26 April 2010. Web.

“Salgado, Sebastiao (1944-): Brazilian Photojournalist.” The Photography Encyclopedia. Rpt. in Masters of Photography. 26 April 2010. Web.

Valdes-Rodriguez, Alisa. “Latino Artists Bear Burden of Anti-Immigrant Frenzy.” Racialicious. 4 March 2008. 26 April 2010. Web.

White, Jack, perf. It Might Get Loud. Dir. Davis Guggenheim. Perfs. Jimmy Page, David “The Edge” Evans. Sony Pictures Classics, 2009. DVD.