Cleaning San Diego: Migration,geography,exclusion,and resistance

Abstract

This essay analyzes the legal and spatial production of invisibility of undocumented immigrants from Mexico living in San Diego, something that Nicholas De Genova has called a “regime of deportability”. Systematic state restrictions and a legal system that criminalizes immigrants, especially from Mexico, are in practice a racialized enforcement of the law producing a condition of permanent “illegality”. This condition of “illegality” is lived through the very real possibility of being deported. To survive this environment, many undocumented immigrants from Mexico have become invisible to the rest of San Diego by relying on informal networks for information about jobs and avoiding surveillance by alerting each other about the presence of law enforcement. We focus especially on women employed in the domestic care industry, who work in private homes by the hour and use various city spaces to connect with and foster these immigrant networks. We conducted focus groups, in-depth interviews, and engaged in participant-observation in spaces such as churches, parks, buses, trolley lines, festivals, sports tournaments, and other places of reunion in North and South San Diego County. We conclude that immigrants find spaces for survival and resistance by cultivating solidarity ties through daily interactions in networks formed in public and semi-public locations.

Keywords

Regime of deportability immigrant networks domestic workers invisibility resistance undocumented immigrants San Diego social geography

This essay analyzes the legal and spatial production of invisibility of undocumented immigrants from Mexico living in San Diego, especially women working in service and cleaning occupations. The discussion also focuses on the daily practices of resistance (albeit limited) that these immigrants engage in to survive oppressive living conditions. Undocumented workers survive by relying on help and information they obtain from informal networks that they have cultivated in public and semi-public spaces, such as parks and churches, as well as public transportation, including city buses and trolley lines (Valdéz-Gardea and Balslev-Clausen, 2007: 205). In these spaces immigrants are paradoxically less visible to the mainstream inhabitants of the city who generally socialize in different places and use the automobile. The fact that Mexican undocumented immigrants are pushed to look for spaces of relative invisibility in order to survive signals the existence of what Nicholas De Genova calls a “regime of deportability”. De Genova argues that systematic state restrictions and a legal system that criminalizes immigrants, especially from Mexico, are in practice a racialized enforcement of the law producing a condition of permanent “illegality”. This condition of illegality is lived through the very real possibility of being deported and is produced by a legal and institutional system that keeps people as a cheap commodity, vulnerable to detention, incarceration, and deportation (2004:161). “Regime of deportability” is an important concept because it allows us to understand how restrictive immigration laws turn undocumented Mexican immigrants into vulnerable workers looking for survival in a hostile environment. By interviewing mostly undocumented women in northern and southern San Diego County, it was possible to have a glimpse into the unstable labor market of cleaning and service workers, primarily undocumented women from Mexico, who work in private homes in the city and who use public spaces and public transportation to connect with larger immigrant networks. This research was also conducted in public and semi-public spaces where immigrants interact, such as churches, parks, buses, trolley lines, public festivals, sports tournaments, and other spaces of reunion. Two initial focus groups and follow-up interviews mainly with women working in domestic care occupations, such as cleaning houses and offices, were conducted. We focused on how immigrant interactions shape the use of public and semi-public spaces. For example, how the daily strategies of survival of undocumented immigrant women working in domestic care have helped to foster solidarity networks that are later leveraged as social capital.

For many persons of Mexican descent, skin color, clothing, and even body language makes them, immigrants or not, immediate suspects of “illegality” in a newly enhanced regime of deportability (De Genova, 2004; Harrison and Lloyd, 2012). Mexican immigrants, especially those with darker skin, endure profiling and surveillance in the city by local and federal authorities. This regime selectively apprehends and removes some immigrants from their communities, while pushing others to survive through invisibility (García and Keyes, 2012). According to the Public Policy Institute of California, in 2013 there were about 170,500 undocumented immigrants in the County of San Diego, with about half of these from Mexico. Despite their proximity with Mexico, both the City and the County of San Diego have a majority White non-Hispanic population, 44 and 48%, respectively. According to the 2010 US Census, Latinos constitute 28% of the population of the city, and 32% of the population of the county.

Undocumented immigrants find jobs through the spaces and networks they inhabit and the daily communicative interactions that those spaces enable. They use interactions in these restrictive places as a means for survival in, and resistance to, an oppressive regime, connecting with other immigrants and forming solidarity bonds for finding employment, services, and in many cases protecting each other from law enforcement. However, the structures created by the legal system and anti-immigrant policies are bigger factors in pushing immigrants into this precariety, leading them to rely on their personal networks as their social capital to find jobs (Herrera-Lima, 2005: 128; Putnam, 2000).

Historically, Mexican immigrants have struggled under difficult labor conditions in US cities, concentrating in low-paying fields such as agriculture, construction, and domestic work (Bernhardt et al., 2009; Reichl-Luthra and Waldinger, 2010; Rocha-Romero, 2011), as a result of restrictive immigration policies (Massey, 2007; Smith, 2009), a more or less constant anti-immigrant public climate, and the increasing number of detentions and deportations in the past few years. Many recent immigrant women face particularly harsh conditions working in the domestic care industry (Donato et. al., 2008; Ibarra, 2007), a highly unregulated field of work that allows exploitation, invisibility, and informality. Given these considerations, we ask the following research questions: How do undocumented Mexicans, especially women who work in domestic services in San Diego use their disadvantaged situation, such as invisibility, to survive and resist their marginal position? How do they interact with, and respond to, a sociopolitical and physical environment oppressing them in a regime of deportability?

To respond these questions, we focus on how sociopolitical, economic, cultural, spatial, communicative, and other relationships influence the behavior of the people who arrive and interact in a particular geographical territory, using social geography as one of our tools for analysis (Del Casino, 2009: 3, 2011). Social geography studies the relationship between the spatial and social structures in creating social differences (Morgan, 1984), focusing on ethnic, demographic, and social disparities in order to find spatial regularities and the relationship between social communities and everyday individual practices (Herbert, 2009; Hubbard, 2011: 531). We are interested in the role that public and semi-public spaces play in framing immigrant interactions in the city. Additionally, we highlight the importance of immigrant communication networks, because those tend not to be discussed when talking about geographical spaces and movement, as past research has mainly focused on the physical aspects of movement and not on the cultural factors that motivate mobility and interaction of people (Hillis, 1998: 544). We consider San Diego an interesting place to observe these dynamics because its closeness to the international border and the constant presence of immigration authorities on its streets makes the regime of deportability notably present for its undocumented inhabitants.

Geography of exclusion in “America’s Finest City”

Miller (2003) and Sorkin (cited in Miller, 2003) have argued that San Diego has been able to hide its contradictions, pushing the real city to the margins while marketing itself as a tourist heaven, or as former Mayor Pete Wilson named it after losing a bid to Miami for the 1972 Republican National Convention, “America’s Finest City” (Granberry, 1985). San Diego’s self-image is that of a place without evident social conflicts, a sort of theme park compared to a more diverse and complex Los Angeles (Miller, 2003: 159–160). San Diego County is fragmented, pluri-centric, and has a mix of predominantly urban spaces with some remaining rural enclaves in the North and the East. The city grew with the expansion of the automobile, the freeway, and the shopping center in the middle of the twentieth century. Many city neighborhood centers and the downtown have shopping malls instead of parks, civic centers, or public plazas. San Diego’s public space is orderly, where public behavior is regulated for the safety and comfort of its users. This is not a space taken or modeled by political actors with tolerance for some disorganization (Mitchell, 1995: 115).

San Diego’s physiognomy has been shaped due mainly to three historic factors: the military industry (Davis, 2003), demographic changes in labor markets, and the productive restructuring of professional services. Particularly the two last factors have been crucial in increasing the presence of immigrant labor from Mexico (Ibarra, 2007) and they are now pushing more women toward the undocumented workforce, performing domestic care work. In the last few years, labor markets have diversified in San Diego, making it a city in transition to high technology research, development, and services. Nevertheless, most of the jobs in the region still come from low-tech industries, such as tourism, medical services, manufacturing of recreational goods, retail, entertainment, horticulture, and agriculture (Alarcón, 2005: 104). However, the constant presence of undocumented workers, especially since the 1990s, has made it easier for professional workers in San Diego to hire house cleaners, gardeners, and nannies (Mattingly, 2001: 376).

San Diego is the second-largest city in California after Los Angeles, and California is the state with the highest percentage of Mexican immigrants (Hoefer et al., 2011). About half of the Latino population in San Diego is from Mexico, making it the city with the seventh highest number of Mexican immigrants in the US (Misra, 2014). The presence of Mexican immigrants in the city and its border location have borne witness to the regime of deportability that De Genova references, since many actual deportations have historically taken place at this border (Rocha-Romero and Ocegueda-Hernández, 2013).

High housing prices and cost of living, segmented labor markets, the presence of an actual border dividing San Diego and Tijuana, and police surveillance, all push and segregate poor San Diegans and undocumented immigrants to precarious employment and housing enclaves. For example, Latino/Hispanic residents of the city have the highest poverty rate of all the inhabitants of San Diego, with 23.4 versus 21.8% for African American and 10.8% for White, non-Hispanic residents, the overall poverty rate of San Diego City is 13.8%. High poverty rates are also reflected geographically in the neighborhoods where Latino immigrants live, such as Vista (with 19.2), El Cajon (20.9%), or San Marcos (14.9%) (Center on Policy Initiatives, 2016). These areas are commonly out of sight of the main attractions that the city promotes, such as its beaches, upscale shopping areas, theme parks, and coastal neighborhoods. Especially in Southern California, city planners have built spaces that facilitate segregation through the development of neighborhoods where minorities, including African-Americans, Latinos, or poor recent immigrants, do not frequently encounter upper-middle-class Whites in their daily lives (Bickford, 2000: 360). San Diego County’s urban structure, with just 735 persons per square mile, contributes to the atomization of human interactions and social movements, such as protests and mobilizations. Los Angeles County, in comparison, has a concentration of 2419 persons per square mile. This was made evident in the 2006 mobilizations for immigration reform, when more than a million marched in Los Angeles, only 50,000 people marched in San Diego Civic Center and yet this was still believed to be the largest mobilization in the city’s history (Berenstein, 2006).

This physical configuration of the city and the preponderance of cars over public transportation, make interaction outside one’s work or neighborhood limited, and have facilitated the regime of deportability by making victims largely invisible to the enfranchised public. San Diego public transportation’s long commute times and the lack of connections to certain neighborhoods, such some areas in the Eastern and the Northern County, increase automobile use. Despite the fact that San Diego County poverty levels have increased from 12.1% in 2007 to 15.6% in 2015 (Center on Policy Initiatives 2016 report), people have not increased the use of public transit. According to the US Census, public transit use among working people ages 16 and up has decreased from 3.4% in the year 2000, to 2.7% in 2014; while the use of the automobile has increased from 73.9 to 76% in the same years (Baxamusa, 2016). Despite this, many of our interviewees mentioned they preferred to use public transportation instead of driving, citing that many immigration apprehensions and eventual deportation may occur due to traffic violations (Alarcón and Becerra, 2012).

Law enforcement and regimes of deportability

Proposed by the Bush administration, the “Secure Communities” program started in 2008 in Harris County Texas, and continued during the Obama administration until its replacement by the Priority Enforcement Program from 2015 to 2017. Secure Communities entails the collaboration between local, state, and federal authorities, especially Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), to identify non-citizens suspected of crimes, for detention and removal from the country. Although San Diego never signed Section 287 (g), a more stringent enforcement of immigrant detention and removal (see the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Website, Immigration and Nationality Act), the county adopted Secure Communities in 2009, and has processed an important number of deportees. For example, according to the Pew Research Center fiscal year 2013 saw record numbers in deportations, with a total of 438,000 deportees nationwide (González-Barrera and Krogstad, 2014). Of those, 241,493 were of Mexican origin. California deported 27.3% of those, while Texas deported 30.8%, and Arizona, 29.3% (Velasco and Coubés, 2013). In 2014, 22,170 of the 316,000 unauthorized migrants deported nationwide were detained and processed in San Diego (Sánchez, 2015); in 2015, this number was 23,279, and in 2016 the number was 19,603 (Morrisey, 2017). The decline in deportations may be due to the adoption of the Priority Enforcement Program that focused only in the removal of people with serious criminal records, although it is difficult to know for sure. However, the Secure Communities program was reinstated by President Trump’s executive order in January 2017 increasing the fear of deportation among immigrant communities.

Deportations are usually the consequence of detention and processing of suspicious individuals found in public spaces, such as highways, streets, and public gatherings—not only in places where people work. The urban organization of the city becomes another factor in criminalizing, incarcerating, and deporting immigrants in times when their perceived undesirability grows. Detentions occur mainly on the freeways and streets in neighborhoods with high concentrations of Latino residents. For example, in the North County neighborhoods of Vista or Escondido, only a few years ago it was a rarity to spot a border patrol car on the streets, but in recent years it is very common to see immigration agents cooperating with the highway police when a person is arrested for a traffic violation in that area. As the Center for American Progress has found, driving is a source of concern for almost two-thirds of undocumented immigrants in North San Diego, while only one-third feel anxious about taking public transit (García and Keyes, 2012: 15).

Short-term political gain, issues of national security related to the war on terror (Coleman, 2007), the war on drugs, fears of major “immigrant floods” caused by unbalanced international labor markets, and economic downturns (Chavez, 2008) are some of the contemporary reasons for further criminalization of immigrants and immigration legislation in the US (Ewing et al., 2015). Despite President Obama’s efforts on immigration reform, passing an executive action in 2014 (halted by a Texan judge in 2015), and implementing Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA (Ehrenfreund, 2014), during his presidency more than 2.5 million immigrants were deported (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, 2016), roughly the same number of people deported from the US between 1892 and 1997 (Shear, 2013). The growing privatization of prisons has also been a driving cause for immigrant criminalization, since the prison industry has turned into a profitable business with political influence. Many immigrants spend long months in detention centers before being processed and deported. In 2005, only about 25% of detained immigrants were in private prisons, by 2014, the number had risen to 62% (Gruberg, 2015). Although at the end of the Obama administration there were plenty of signs that the federal Bureau of Prisons was going to gradually move away from the for-profit model of incarceration, President Donald Trump has made clear that he believes those prisons are needed for his current “immigrant crackdown” approach (Sommer, 2017). These measures make private incarceration another element of the regime of deportability that not only produces cheap labor, but profitable inmates.

This regime of deportability—as well as other historical causes of displacement, such as unaffordable housing markets, housing regulations, and labor laws—has pushed San Diego immigrants to East, South, and North County (Light, 2006). In places such as Carlsbad or Oceanside we observed that many undocumented immigrants live in canyons in between rows of luxury residences that they have contributed to building and maintaining. Others live in cramped rental houses in which there are up to 20 beds ready to be occupied as different work shifts unfold during the day and night. The more established ones live with their extended families in small apartments in which most of the adults contribute to household expenses. Many immigrant households, even with mixed immigration status members, are pushed to seek the invisibility of these precarious neighborhoods, where people engage in activities of self-employment, offering services such as cleaning or selling food, clothing, or other products. Undocumented immigrants also rely on the help from their documented family members or friends for everyday tasks such as shopping and other household activities (Garcia and Keyes, 2012).

Harvey referred to “geographical imagination” or “spatial knowledge” when discussing the role of space in the individual biographies of urban dwellers and workers (2009: 24). As other studies have previously found (Garcia and Keyes, 2012), our interviewees said they felt more visible and vulnerable to law enforcement authorities in a car than using public transportation. Until very recently many undocumented immigrants could not get official driver’s licenses in California (National Conference of State Legislatures, 2015), further restricting their use of vehicles. Also, many immigrant vehicles are made conspicuous by mechanical and maintenance problems, missing brake lights, and car decorations such religious or ethnic motifs hanging from mirrors, something forbidden by US transit laws. Drivers of these vehicles are easily profiled by police officers that may stop and direct them to ICE authorities, as has happened in cities in the North County, where traffic stops have led to deportations (Garcia and Keyes, 2012: 11).

According to Licona and Maldonado (2014: 520), anti-immigrant sentiments and law enforcement can create a climate of what they call “negatively coded visibility” for Mexican immigrants. This negatively coded visibility contributes to immigrant profiling and selective detention and deportation, pushing the remaining population to invisibility, although not necessarily inaction. These structural forces have created an informal economic sector benefiting the most visible mainstream, mainly White and wealthy (positively coded) inhabitants of the city who enjoy the products of the labor of the (negatively coded) invisible and semi-invisible undocumented immigrants.

San Diego physical infrastructure contributes to constraining labor opportunities for undocumented immigrants and pushes them toward invisibility, while still using them for cleaning, landscaping, and other service jobs. Paradoxically this invisibility allows undocumented immigrants to survive, albeit precariously, finding jobs and sometimes a sense of community, belonging, and protection through semi-underground communication and solidarity networks. Some of those networks are even fostered by the use of the San Diego public transit system, strategically used by some workers to resist the regime of deportability that is more prominent in the city streets and freeways.

Methodology

In order to gauge the usage of urban spaces by immigrants and the construction of informal communication networks, the researchers attended and participated in a variety of activities, including political and social gatherings, such as festivals, sports tournaments, workshops, and marches, from October 2011 through to the end of 2012. Two extended focus groups were also conducted in November 2011 and February 2012 in Vista, a neighborhood located in North County San Diego. These focus groups were possible with the help of members from the Indigenous Front of Binational Organizations (FIOB), an organization to which one of the researchers is affiliated. FIOB allowed us to ask questions of participants in their community gatherings in Vista. The first focus group had eight participants, two males and six females, all adults between 24 and 60 years of age. In the second focus group participated 25 adults between 20 and 64 years of age, 14 females and 11 males. One of the researchers taught a workshop on computer literacy and after it, all of the attendants agreed to participate in the focus group answering questions about transportation and occupation. People attending the focus groups were mostly (about 60%) from the state of Oaxaca but also there were people from Michoacán, Zacatecas, Hidalgo, and Puebla. Questions asked included those surrounding employment, health, education, and migratory concerns. After the focus groups, 12 in-depth interviews were conducted with women who work cleaning houses by the hour in San Diego (many of them we contacted through the focus groups and community references), plus another four interviews with community leaders and organizers, three males and one female. Most of the women interviewed, whose ages ranged from 29 to 53 years, work in cleaning services and were all undocumented immigrants living in San Diego, except for one who crossed several days a week from Tijuana. Although we did not ask the question directly during the focus groups for safety reasons, their immigration status was brought up in the follow-up interviews, and research protocols were followed to preserve the anonymity of participants.

Since social geography focuses on places and the interactions that they enable, it has had an important influence on more qualitative studies using anthropological and sociological research techniques, such as participant observation, focus groups, and in-depth interviews (Aldrey-Vásquez, 2006: 17–20). Two interviews were conducted on public transportation by one of the researchers while traveling using the Blue Trolley line from San Ysidro to Downtown San Diego, and the city bus route 30 from Downtown to the neighborhood of La Jolla. Through these interactions it was possible to gain the trust of community members using public transportation, and understand how informal labor markets depend on different communication networks.

Findings

According to a 2012 National Domestic Workers Alliance study, workers performing domestic labor, such as cleaning, caring for children, pets, the disabled, the elderly, and preparing food in private homes, are 95% female (Burnham and Theodore, 2012). This often-informal industry keeps expanding: from 2004 to 2010 the number of people working these jobs grew from 666,435 to 726,437 (Burnham and Theodore, 2012: 10). A good proportion of domestic workers are undocumented, and thus have less income and are exposed to more precarious conditions of labor, such as working while they are sick, lifting heavy objects, or handling chemicals that may injure them or compromise their health, than do those with documents. Workers in this industry suffer from historical mistreatment, such as low wages and a lack of benefits. Some of them make less than the minimum wage, may experience wage theft, and have limited breaks (Milkman et al., 2010: 32).

All the women we interviewed working in domestic care in San Diego mentioned they do not have social security or health insurance, and are given a reduced number of working hours per week, so they cannot claim any benefits beyond their monetary compensation. They also risk detention and deportation while traveling to their jobs across San Diego either by car or using public transportation, because they have a higher likelihood of being profiled by law enforcement. We also learned that they worked less than 20 hours and had an income ranging from $100 to $300 dollars per week. Our interviewees said they got their jobs through family or friend connections and through recommendations from former or current employers. People who pay for their services are predominantly non-Hispanic Whites or well-to-do Latinos living in San Diego. Despite the fact that none of the women had medical insurance, they considered that for the most part they were treated fairly in their jobs, although they wanted more hours so they could earn more money and did not have to piece together multiple jobs across the city. Some of the women told us that they worked mainly in the coastal areas such as La Jolla, Encinitas, Mission Bay, and Del Mar, but most of the focus groups participants worked in the cities of Vista, Encinitas, and Carlsbad, and lived in Vista, Oceanside, or Escondido. None of the interviewed women living in San Diego considered going back to Mexico as an option in the short or long term, except for one who lived in Tijuana and crossed using a tourist visa to clean houses in San Diego. Despite these factors, interviewees asserted that their work conditions were bearable, and sometimes even more favorable than in Mexico, despite the lack of benefits and job security. For example, Lupe (name changed) told us that the people she works for “are not used to paying for health insurance, but they treat me well, I think because they need me, and they treat me as family” (San Ysidro California, 22 March 2012). Lupe lives in Tijuana where she moved from Sonora more than 20 years ago, and she crosses the border every time she has a cleaning job in San Diego. She finished college, but she works cleaning houses in San Diego because “I live in a country that expels its workers”. Of all the women we interviewed, Lupe is the one reporting making the highest daily pay, at $140 dollars per day she works.

Another woman, Maria (name changed), who is also from Mexico and has lived in San Diego for two decades, told us that she works cleaning houses mostly in the areas of Carlsbad, Encinitas, and Oceanside because her working options are limited for lack of work documents:

In the US I work cleaning houses because there are no other jobs close to me that I can get easily without papers. We also make more money than in other places. In the Swap Meet they pay you 40 dollars for the day, and cleaning houses you make 50 to 80 dollars. I make about 60 dollars per day, and I work 3 days a week…I think my employers treat me fairly well, although I do not have medical insurance or any other social security (Vista, CA, 30 May 2012).

Lupe asks her employers to provide her with all the cleaning supplies, since she cannot have many of those in her car, as to not raise suspicion in case of an inspection by Border Patrol agents when crossing the border. Maria, on the other hand, uses San Diego public transit to go from place to place, and has made many friends in the buses she rides every morning and in public gatherings. This dependence of word-of-mouth recommendations, while keeping domestic workers relatively invisible from labor authorities, makes them vulnerable to precarious working conditions, such as lack of health insurance, reduced wages, wage theft, abuse, and other situations that they do not protest because they want to continue getting recommendations for future jobs. Despite this, women who work in domestic care by the hour still perceive their work environment as better than live-in domestic workers (Handengou-Sotelo, 2007) and rely heavily on their networks for future opportunities of employment. For example, Maria gets her cleaning jobs mainly through recommendations of family and friends, and Lupe mostly through her employers, since she does not live in San Diego and uses her own car when she crosses the border, something that has kept her away from local immigrant networks.

Geographical and communication networks established by the movement of these workers in the city, both help them to find their next job, and hinder their possibilities for improving their labor conditions due to the consequences of the regime of deportability surrounding them. As with Maria, all the other women interviewed said that their employers do not request migratory documentation from them when they offer cleaning jobs.

Something that concerns hourly domestic workers in the city of San Diego is police surveillance, for example, Maria considered that there was so much vigilance in San Diego: “immigration agents use civilian clothes, they look like common people” showing up in public places or in apartment complexes where immigrants live, conducting immigration inspections (Mercado, 2015). Although Maria said she has been lucky and has never been stopped by immigrant authorities, some of her friends have not been so lucky and she fears going from one place to another: “it is difficult to move around mainly if you do not know the bus routes and stops, although transportation is slow and expensive, I use the buses to go to work unless a friend or my brother give me a ride”.

In this regard, it is worth analyzing what another domestic worker named Lucia (named changed) commented:

They need me, they treat me well … if it is a poor neighborhood there is a lot of vigilance from the police and immigration authorities. If it is a wealthier neighborhood, there is nobody on the streets to bother you. I have never been detained or stopped for interrogation. I work in a wealthy neighborhood (La Jolla). I have to do this kind of work, because Mexico did not offer me the right opportunities of employment (San Ysidro, April 2012).

The link between physical space and people’s behavior is referenced in social geography and it helps to understand how undocumented immigrants move around the city avoiding surveillance. Lucia (as did María and Lupe), made reference to experiences and anxieties going from place to place in San Diego showing how vigilance of public spaces is selective; it mainly occurs in the places of residence of immigrant communities, on freeways and along the border (García and Keyes, 2012), but not in the neighborhoods where they work. Both men and women who participated in our focus groups all considered that there was much police and border patrol surveillance in San Diego, and some of them said that the police stopped them frequently for minor traffic issues or to “inspect their cars”, and they preferred not to call the attention of the authorities. For example, in a focus group in November 2011 in Vista, Pedro (name changed), said that he prefers to use more buses rather than his car for commuting to work under this climate, and recommends other immigrants to follow the law: “many times, it is oneself who finds trouble, it is better to stay away from trouble if possible”. Three out of six women who participated in one of the focus groups in Vista used public transportation in part to avoid police and border patrol vigilance, one of them saying: “the officers just check your tickets, that is all” and one considered police surveillance to be sporadic on public transportation, while two considered the surveillance to be minimal, and one of the six women considered that there was no police surveillance at all on the city buses. Four of these women got their cleaning jobs through friends, and two more said they asked former employers for future gigs. Marina (name changed), who works in childcare, mentioned that her behavior has changed with more vigilance: “I belong to a community group that exchanges information about what to do in case we are stopped by the police, who to call, and what to do if that happens to us”. Another participant, a 39-year-old woman from Chiapas, told us that she uses public transportation to go to her two cleaning jobs in downtown San Diego from Chula Vista, where she rents an apartment with another six people, and only leaves her house to go to work. Her friend, a 37-year-old woman from Guatemala living in Barrio Logan, also works in downtown, sharing a home with other people, and moving constantly. She uses Barrio Logan bus routes to arrive at her hotel cleaning job, and she leaves her home only for work and grocery shopping. Both women said they had not seen much police surveillance on public transportation, but they still fear for their safety and possible detention and deportation when walking along San Diego’s streets.

Fear instilled by the presence of law enforcement in immigrant communities results in less cooperation in reporting and to acting as crime witnesses (Coleman, 2007: 618), because non-legal existence is a state of subjugation as a result of their vulnerability to deportation (Menjívar, 2006: 1007). Other interviewees mentioned that they have changed their daily activities and lifestyles because they feel more observed by the police, especially on the North County streets. José González, an FIOB community organizer who lives in Vista and travels widely in northern San Diego mentioned:

I observe my surroundings to see if there is a police car hiding. La migra [ICE officers] usually stops in Cannon Avenue from 2 to 5 am, on Highway 78. I am always driving those highways. I program my truck to go to the speed limit, and police officers driving by just look at me, drive next to me for a while, and then drive away. I am a naturalized citizen, but I always think about my cousins or friends who do not have documents, and I alert them about those checkpoints (Vista, November 2011).

Interviewees and participants in both focus groups in Vista declared that there is a need for the community to organize and communicate with each other in order to be safe, and many of them have joined both formal and informal groups that alert each other to the presence of law enforcement, as Mr Gonzalez does. Members of these groups alert their families and friends to use alternative streets through text messages and phone calls so they can dodge possible detention or interrogation. People pay attention to the radio, send text messages to each other, and most recently, use social media such as Whatsapp and Facebook to find out about possible police and Border Patrol presence in the area. This constitutes an innovative use of social networks, cell phones, and the Internet to resist surveillance and detention.

Public transportation was considered a space less subjected to police surveillance and therefore safer than community gatherings and freeways by most of our interviewees, although this has its exceptions, and Border Patrol operations are also observed in public transportation, especially in places closer to the border, such as San Ysidro. Anti-immigrant policies and attitudes have pushed undocumented immigrants to resist this regime of deportability, using contacts made in gatherings and networks to collectively monitor public spaces to protect each other. For example, cramped living conditions in the North County have also led to the development of community ties based on solidarity, fostering forms of social capital for survival. Sergio (name changed), an immigrant from Oaxaca, organizes basketball matches among agricultural workers in this area, an idea that was generated after long conversations he and other male immigrants from that state had while getting ready for their daily commute to work in the fields and nurseries in Carlsbad and Oceanside (10 October 2011). These informal basketball matches among friends have led to a formal yearly tournament celebrated in public parks in northern San Diego. Local advocacy organizations, such as clinics and immigrant services institutions, support these efforts either through donations or by using the gatherings to educate the public about their immigrant rights. Many immigrant activists groups also use these opportunities to strengthen social networks and to warn people about police surveillance in the city. For example, Figure 1 illustrates how immigrant advocates used a local newsletter to spread the word about police activity and offer protection and legal services to immigrants who may need it after having an encounter with the police. The newsletter, El Mosquito Zumbador (The buzzing mosquito) published by the San Diego Day Laborer Association, is distributed where immigrants gather. This way, immigrants use public spaces to forge solidarity ties, strengthen social capital, and connect local organizations and individuals to larger immigrant networks.

Figure 1.

Illustration from El Mosquito Zumbador a community publication by the Association of Day Laborers in San Diego. October to December 2009. Translation (by the authors): Attention! Have you seen checkpoints in the area asking for driver licenses? If you or someone you know got a citation while passing through a checkpoint for driving without a proper license, please call us immediately. We may be able to help you with free legal immigration advice. You can do something to protect yourself from that unjust treatment, and we are here to help. For more information, please call.

Although living under the surveillance of the security state expressed in the configuration of San Diego geography has affected the quality of life of immigrants, marginalizing their lives and making them prone to fear and anxiety, community organizing has made this regime of deportability more bearable by developing strategies of solidarity, using invisibility as a form of survival and resistance to the gaze of authorities.

Conclusion

Economic and sociopolitical factors, selective law enforcement, negatively coded visibility, urban segregation, and public rhetoric have all pushed undocumented Mexican immigrants toward invisibility and vulnerability in a regime that criminalizes them in order to gain economic advantage from their labor. In recent times, immigrant detention centers have even become sources of profit for private companies, further cultivating this regime of deportability. In this essay, we have discussed how undocumented immigrants from Mexico have used geographic spaces, such as public gatherings to enrich their social networks and public transportation for mobility and survival. Undocumented domestic service workers participate in informal labor markets and networks that go largely unnoticed by the mainstream population in the city. Although domestic workers are needed, the human rights and free movement of these workers are guaranteed neither by public policy, nor the justice system, nor the city’s infrastructure. However, invisibility becomes a double-edged sword, because while it provides a certain degree of “safety” to mobilize resources in an underground market, it also contributes to the regime of deportability that racializes and criminalizes the presence of darker-skin Mexicans and other Latinos in the city, maintaining the disposability of undocumented labor and instigating fears of being profiled, detained, and deported.

The zones where immigrants live along border cities such as San Diego are more surveyed than other places in the country, with the constant presence of law enforcement patrols, surveillance technologies, and police checkpoints. Ultimately, as Castells (2007) has argued, communication and information have historically been sources of power and counter-power. Vulnerable immigrants adjust and resist harsh living circumstances, creating their own communication networks. While law enforcement authorities observe immigrants, immigrants also observe the movement of patrols and agents in their neighborhoods, and communicate with each other over the whereabouts of police cars and immigration checkpoints. They also connect through a network of public transportation and community gatherings to find out about jobs or housing opportunities. These small acts can be seen as strategies for resistance and survival in an increasingly stringent immigration environment and the geographical conditions of a city that privilege a consumer culture, while criminalizing its most vulnerable inhabitants.

In our work, the women we interviewed generally felt that they were treated fairly by the people who hired them, that their overall labor and living conditions are precarious, without access to social security, or possibilities of complaint for mistreatment. They get their cleaning “gigs” through network connections, while enduring labor conditions that mostly benefit their employers, causing an increase of underground employment (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2007). This precarious situation has been extended due to policy restrictions in immigration laws, but also due to market and geographical forces that foster an underground movement of people in San Diego, a city self-identified as orderly and beautiful. The large number of professionals and tourists living and visiting San Diego also requires more domestic help and workers to clean and beautify the urban spaces. Under this scenario, policies of surveillance and control linked to an increased militarization of the border, such as the Secure Communities program, and the need for cheap labor in informal service markets, have pushed the undocumented population to a place of invisibility, never to be mentioned in the narrative of a city promoted as the “Finest” in America.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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