Migration Dialogues Speaker Series: "Racial Safeguarding and Caring Control: How Latinx Immigration Agents Negotiate Race at Work"

When

noon, April 22, 2022

Presented by the UA College of Social and Behavioral Science's Binational Migration Institute and co-presented by the UA Center for Latin American Studies, School of Mexico Initiatives, School of Mexican American Studies, School of Sociology, and the UA Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry

Join us Friday, April 22 at 12pm on Zoom for a talk in the Migration Dialogues Speaker Series!

This talk,  "Racial Safeguarding and Caring Control: How Latinx Immigration Agents Negotiate Race at Work," will be hosted by UC Irvine's Department of Sociology Assistant Professor Dr. Irene Vega 

Talk summary: Approximately half of the U.S. Border Patrol is Latinx; many of these agents are children of Mexican immigrants who grew up along the border they now police. For these agents, a job in immigration control is a step up in the mobility ladder, but also a deep step into the racialized politics of immigration control. Drawing on interviews with Latinx Border Patrol agents I examine how they reconcile competing loyalties between their ethnoracial and professional commitments. I develop the concepts of “racial safeguarding” and “caring control” to capture how agents contend with the paradoxes of achieving upward mobility via employment in the U.S. immigration system. Racial safeguarding involves agents framing themselves as an accountability check on racial violence against immigrants, while caring control is about engaging in certain gestures to improve the qualitative character of immigrants’ custodial experience. I show that these ways of framing their work pacify Latinx agents who have insecurities about the system they represent. Ultimately, then, racial safeguarding and caring control uphold the racial status quo in the Border Patrol, allowing the agency to use Latinx bodies to protect itself against accusations of racism, while continuing with business as usual.

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