Jonathan Adams

Juan Crow in Georgia

Roberto Lovato goes down South to learn more about life as a Latino in Georgia. Lovato follows a seventeen year old girl, Justeen Mancha and describes her experiences with Juan Crow.

Originally published in The Nation

By Roberto Lovato

The toll this increasingly oppressive climate has taken on Mancha represents but a small part of its effects on noncitizen immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants, and other Latinos. Mancha and the younger children of the mostly immigrant Latinos in Georgia are learning and internalizing that they are different from white—and black—children not just because they have the wrong skin color but also because many of their parents lack the right papers. They are growing up in a racial and political climate in which Latinos’ subordinate status in Georgia and in the Deep South bears more than a passing resemblance to that of African-Americans who were living under Jim Crow. Call it Juan Crow: the matrix of laws, social customs, economic institutions and symbolic systems enabling the physical and psychic isolation needed to control and exploit undocumented immigrants.

To read more.

Posted at 6:00 AM, May 09, 2008 in Immigration | Permalink | View Comments