Western History Association 59th Annual Conference

The Repurposed Detention Camp: Comparative German and Mexican Labor and Detention Practices

• In Event: The Birth Of A State: Slavery, Confinement, Incarceration, And The Origins Of Ethnic Cleansing In California

Abstract

I am proposing my paper, entitled "The Repurposed Detention Camp: Comparative German and Mexican Labor and Detention Practices” to the Western History Association Conference. This paper examines the origins of the El Centro Immigration Detention Camp in El Centro, California, within the context of World War II, national security fears, and the creation of a forced detainee labor system. Immigration officers opened the El Centro Camp as World War II was coming to an end. This background is critical in understanding how detention developed in El Centro. By 1945, the INS had abundant experience confining people classified as enemy aliens. Immigration officers created the El Centro Camp by repurposing the carcass of a former internment camp and with the unpaid labor of Mexican migrants. The structures that the federal government used to construct the Camp in El Centro were originally part of the Fort Stanton Internment Camp in New Mexico, a place that held German detainees. After the Fort Stanton Camp closed, INS officers hauled its’ buildings and tools and transferred them to El Centro. This handover of materials from one carceral space to another speaks to how entrenched confinement was and continues to be in the United States. The prehistory of the El Centro Immigration Detention Camp and the internment of Germans also suggests that immigration officers had alternative models for how to operate detention facilities.

Jessica (Yesika) Ordaz is Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. She received her doctorate from the University of California Davis in American History, with a minor field in Latin American History. During the 2017-2018 academic year, Ordaz was the Andrew W. Mellon Sawyer Seminar postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington, which focused on comparative racial capitalism. Professor Ordaz is currently completing a book manuscript entitled, The Functions of Immigration Detention: Forced Labor, Transnational Migrant Politics and Punishment in California’s Imperial Valley, 1939-2014. The Functions of Immigration Detention examines the history of the El Centro Immigration Detention Center, an immigration facility located in California’s Imperial Valley, to explore the roots of and activism against immigration detention in the United States.

Author

• Jessica Ordaz, University of Colorado Boulder