By Kent Baxter
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“Blistering heat and driving South Texas wind had long since worn away the simple wooden cross that once marked the grave of this unknown.” |
SPECIAL FEATURE
Professor Nestor Rodriguez still gets the phone calls, the phone calls and the letters with small faded photographs, pleas for help from the families of los desaparecidos, the disappeared, those who have attempted to make the journey to the land of opportunity and lost their lives along the way. It began with a relatively small research grant. Six years ago, the American Friend's Service Committee, a Quaker organization, awarded $10,000 to the newly formed University of Houston Center for Immigration Research to tally the number of migrants who die attempting to cross the Texas-Mexico border. A summer was spent scouring official records and interviewing patrol officers, medical examiners, morticians, justices of the peace, and county clerks.
When the data was compiled, the grim truth was that at least 190 and as many as 330 immigrants die each year attempting to make their way to El Norte. Even more shocking than these raw numbers was the study's observation that many of these deaths go undocumented and its conclusion that intensified border enforcement had increased deaths because it forced immigrants to cross more dangerous territory.
When "Migrant Deaths at the Texas-Mexico Border, 1985-1994" was released in a journal on migration research, it was greeted with unexpected national and international attention. Articles appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the Houston Chronicle. The center was inundated with calls from the media, from documentary filmmakers, from fellow scholars, and, surprising to its researchers, from the families of those who comprised the alarming numbers that had made the morning headlines. Family members were looking for their loved ones; it fell to Rodriguez to reluctantly inform them that they were doing a study, not searching for bodies. "Immigration is often spoken about in the vocabulary of economics," he observes, reflecting upon the passion incited by his work. "We put it into the vocabulary of mothers, wives, families, and human things like death."
Since its inception in 1995, the UH Center for Immigration Research has done just that: given voice to the stories of those who have crossed the geographical and cultural divide that separates the United States from its southern neighbors and of those who have fallen between the cracks in that crossing. In all of that time, Professors Nestor Rodriguez and Jacqueline Hagan, the founders and codirectors of the center, have never lost sight of what drew them to these stories in the first place.
Born in Corpus Christi of a Mexican American family, Rodriguez learned very early the ethic of hard work and the value of a good education. "When I was in middle school," he recalls, speaking of a father who worked as a janitor at a local junior college, "he would clean the science building at night. In those days, students would throw away their books at the end of the semester. My father would bring books home from the buildings he’d clean, and I would use those books to train myself."
This training got him into Texas A&I University-Kingsville with a double major in math and physics, but the impassioned social movements of minorities he witnessed as a student changed his interest from physical laws to social laws and inspired him to pursue a doctorate in sociology at the University of Texas.
It was while he was completing his doctoral research on Mexican immigrants in Austin and San Antonio that he became committed to the people who would inspire his life's work. "I found the immigrants to be very full of energy, captivating," he recalls. "They weren't slackers waiting for life to bring something to them. They were out there making life. It's extremely motivating to do research with those types of people."
A 1984 appointment in Houston, one of the most diverse cities in the nation, afforded Rodriguez plenty of opportunities to analyze immigrant communities in great detail. In his early years at UH, he authored one of the first studies in the country on immigrants from Central America. Three years later, a former professor approached him about a bright graduate student who was looking for a location to complete the research for her dissertation. Rodriguez cautiously agreed to give her a try. "He thought I was a prima donna," his colleague and fellow professor Jacqueline Hagan muses. "But when he saw me interact with the Central American population, we just hit it off." Together, they completed a study of how immigrants in Houston responded to the 1986 immigration law. Hagan was hired as an assistant professor of sociology at UH soon after.
Like her new teammate, Hagan knew something firsthand bout migrant cultures. The daughter of a diplomat, she spent her childhood hopscotching between Chile, Brazil, Portugal, Ireland, Canada, Thailand, South Africa, and Switzerland. After completing college in France and the U.S., she finally landed in Costa Rica where she taught school and managed a design business.
Though she initially welcomed the opportunity to settle down in one place, her intellectual interest in demography and migration led her back to the University of Texas at Austin, where she pursued an advanced degree in sociology and where she was first introduced to Nestor Rodriguez.
The team has coauthored twelve publications since that meeting in 1987. They founded the Center for Immigration Research to attract like-minded scholars and to gain greater visibility for funding. This visibility was taken to new heights when Rodriguez, Hagan, and Associate Professor of Sociology Karl Eschbach published the study on migrant deaths in 1996 and a companion study of the entire U.S.-Mexico border a year later.
And much important work followed. A Ford Foundation grant funded a study of how the 1996 welfare and immigration reform acts affected immigrant communities in Texas and Mexico. Helen Rose Ebaugh and Janet Chafetz, professors of sociology and active researchers at the center, published one of the first books to address the role of religious congregations in the settlement of new immigrants. Inspired by the success of this work, Hagan and Ebaugh are currently documenting religious activities along the entire migrant journey to the United States. Recently, Scott Phillips, an assistant professor and colleague who specializes in criminology, has joined forces with the center to investigate the treatment of immigrants during arrest and detention. CONTINUED
Kent Baxter is a writer and editor at California State University
and a Houston Institute for Culture board member.
Originally published in Collegium, the magazine of the University of Houston. Used with permission.