The Sense of Law is Lost”: Car Impoundments and the Racial Naturalization of Mexican Immigrants

• In Event: 225 - Section on Latino/a Sociology Paper Session. Latino/a Crimmigration Politics

Abstract

The car impoundment is an informal technology of immigration enforcement that impoverishes undocumented, unlicensed drivers and constitutes an instance of what Devon Carbado terms “racial naturalization.” While immigration scholars have extensively analyzed devolution or the process of farming out federal immigration enforcement responsibilities to local police, car impoundments have received comparatively little attention. This local police practice, while nominally about traffic safety, constitutes a ritual of humiliation that impedes the economic and physical mobility of undocumented Mexican immigrants and naturalizes them not to US citizenship but to US racial hierarchy. Drawing on three years of participant observation and 61 interviews with Mexican immigrants in two California cities, this paper also examines immigrants’ assessments of police in general. These range from the strongly positive to the strongly negative, revealing important variation in immigrants’ experience of police. Interestingly, even when immigrants’ assessments of police were strongly negative, they still report an ambivalence about whether police can be trusted. While negative regard of police by working class people of color is certainly not a new phenomenon, I argue that this ambivalence indicates an ongoing normative investment in the police as an institution despite the widespread understanding that they are engaged in racial profiling.

Author

• Samuel Gregory Prieto, University of San Diego