Racialized Policing: Mexican American Police Officers’ Racialization of Unauthorized Immigrants

• In Event: 4412 - Section on Latino/a Sociology Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 05. Shifts in Support and in the Policing of Latina/o/xs in the United States

Abstract

This paper is concerned with police-community relations along the south Texas-Mexico border between Mexican American police officers and Latin-origin unauthorized immigrants. Specifically, this paper explores how unauthorized Latin-origin immigrants are racialized by police officers through the use of derogatory terminology. Feagin’s (2010) theoretical framework of the white racial frame is utilized in order to contextualize the racialized mistreatment of unauthorized Latin-origin immigrants by Mexican American police officers. In this paper, I argue that some Mexican Americans adopt and internalize the white racial frame and thus, from within this frame, a subframe emerges that operates as a mechanism to reinforce the white-racial-frame narrative of unauthorized Latin-origin immigrants.
Data for this ethnographic study were collected in a medium-sized police department located on the south Texas-Mexico border between the years 2012 and 2015.

Author

• Eric Gamino, California State University-Northridge