U.C.L.A. Law Review

Growing Up in Authoritarian 1950s East LA

Gerald P. López

ABSTRACT

By the 1950s, the criminal justice system had long combined with other systems, institutions, and individuals to target all the residents of East LA—particularly Mexicans—as criminals. In equating Mexicans with criminality, these networked forces and actors regarded and treated these residents as exceptions—as morally requiring and legally meriting authoritarian rather than accountability practices. These practices did not require invocation of the president’s emergency power and did not occur outside the rule of law. Instead, authoritarian practices targeting exceptions like the residents of 1950s East LA reflect routine choices made from (and always available) within the rule of law, made across eras and regions and colonial outposts of the , representing the paradigmatic instances of authoritarianism in a constitutional democracy. Contrary to time-honored wisdom, we cannot eliminate the availability of clashing choices within law. Authoritarian practices—every bit as much as accountability practices at the other end of the same continuum—are and shall remain legally legitimate action. Contrary to pacifying speeches, lectures, and sermons, we cannot eliminate fierce struggles over rival visions of the national community. Every discretionary choice each of us makes within networks of systems, institutions, and individuals expresses a view about how we wish to live in our neighborhoods, this country, and across the globe, including which people we feel justified in targeting as exceptions, often for racist reasons. Yet we can and should challenge and aim to obliterate widely hailed and deeply delusional orthodoxies about the criminal justice system, about networked authoritarian practices, about the rule of law itself. Those who insist we must remain loyal to these lies offer a horrific but familiar endorsement of life in 1950s East LA and of the current status quo. Living as we still do in the United States routinely degrades, devastates, and destroys certain groups of people. Living as we still do regularly benefits certain others, especially those within the networked systems targeting exceptions and the bipartisan mainstream enablers who rarely, if ever, put themselves on the line against authoritarian practices. “Enough,” as many people I knew growing up in 1950s East LA would say. “Enough.” Let’s unflinchingly face ourselves— and our networks, institutions, and systems (including the rule of law in a constitutional democracy). Let’s get on with discovering the possibilities and the limits of coexistence.

AUTHOR

Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law. This Article traces its origins to a keynote speech I gave at the UCLA Law Review & BruinX Symposium: “Latinx Communities, Race, and the Criminal Justice

66 UCLA L. Rev. 1532 (2019) System.” Deepest thanks to the organizers of and participants at the Symposium, to the UCLA law librarians, to the UCLA Law Review, and to the late Joaquin Avila, Devon W. Carbado, Roy B. Cazares, Kathleen Foley, Heejin Hwang, Stacy Kwon, Sheri Lynn Johnson, Gary Peck, Hector Ramón, Lucía Sánchez, Jessica Sonley, Sherod Th axton, Alex Wang, and all those who lived in 1950s East LA.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ...... 1534 I. 1950s East LA ...... 1544 A. As a Very Young Child, Living on Eastman Avenue Between Olympic Boulevard and Union Pacific Avenue, Immediately Adjacent to the Blacktop Playground of Eastman Avenue Elementary School ...... 1545 1. Ages 1–4 ...... 1545 2. Ages 5–8 ...... 1550 3. Ages 9, 10 ...... 1559 B. One Story, One Interpretation ...... 1576 II. Cultivated Disrespect, Dangerous Ignorance ...... 1577 A. Cultivated Disrespect ...... 1577 B. Dangerous Ignorance ...... 1578 III. Living Within the Real Rule of Law in Our Constitutional Democracy ...... 1580 Epilogue ...... 1585

1533 1534 66 UCLA L. REV. 1532 (2019)

INTRODUCTION

It is absolutely true that, in targeting low-income, of color, and immigrant communities, the criminal justice system works in tandem with other systems: public health, immigration, and education, to name just some. It is absolutely true that the criminal justice system works in tandem with other nations, from Mexico to Russia, and within diverse public and civic and private networks, including but hardly limited to those at the heart of institutional political economy: the labor market, the housing market, the financial and banking industries, and the chamber of commerce. It is every bit as true that law enforcement officers, prosecutors, judges, corrections officials, prison guards, parole officers, probation officers, truancy officers, ICE employees, and border patrol officers use law as they choose—as they please—to surveil, to stop and question and frisk, to knock and talk, to arrest, to charge, to deport, to prosecute, to sentence, to incarcerate, to detain, and, upon release, to degrade reentry into a cycle of soul-numbing dead ends, almost as if designed to make certain the formerly incarcerated end up once again locked up and, in any event, shrunk into existential despair.1

1. For only a sample of sources worthy of careful study, see MICHELLE ALEXANDER, THE NEW JIM CROW: MASS INCARCERATION IN THE AGE OF COLORBLINDNESS (2010); MARY BOSWORTH, EXPLAINING U.S. (2010); MICHELLE BROWN, THE CULTURE OF PUNISHMENT: PRISON, SOCIETY, AND SPECTACLE (2009); ANGELA Y. DAVIS, ARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? (2003); ERNEST DRUCKER, A PLAGUE OF PRISONS: THE EPIDEMIOLOGY OF MASS INCARCERATION IN AMERICA (2011); JAMES FORMAN JR., LOCKING UP OUR OWN: AND PUNISHMENT IN BLACK AMERICA (2017); RUTH WILSON GILMORE, THE GOLDEN GULAG: PRISONS, SURPLUS, CRISIS, AND OPPOSITION IN GLOBALIZING (2007); MARIE GOTTSCHALK, CAUGHT: THE PRISON STATE AND THE LOCKDOWN OF AMERICAN POLITICS (2015); MARIE GOTTSCHALK, THE PRISON AND THE GALLOWS: THE POLITICS OF MASS INCARCERATION IN AMERICA (2006); BERNARD E. HARCOURT, ILLUSION OF ORDER: THE FALSE PROMISE OF BROKEN WINDOWS POLICING (2001); DORIS J. JAMES & LAUREN E. GLAZE, U.S. DEP’T OF JUSTICE, MENTAL HEALTH PROBLEMS OF PRISON AND JAIL INMATES (2006), http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/mhppji.pdf [http://perma.cc/C3SW- 2BE6]; SABRINA JONES & MARC MAUER, RACE TO INCARCERATE: A GRAPHIC RETELLING (2013); RANDALL KENNEDY, Race, Law and Suspicion: Using Color as a Proxy for Dangerousness, in RACE, CRIME, AND THE LAW 136 (Vintage Books 1998) (1997); MARC MAUER, THE SENTENCING PROJECT, RACE TO INCARCERATE (2d ed. 2006) (1999); OFFICE OF HAWAIIAN AFFAIRS, THE DISPARATE TREATMENT OF NATIVE HAWAIIANS IN THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM (2010), http://www.justicepolicy.org/uploads/justice policy/documents/0-09_rep_disparatetreatmentofnativehawaiians_rd-ac.pdf [http:// perma.cc/4QAC-4Y6A]; ROBERT PERKINSON, TEXAS TOUGH: THE RISE OF AMERICA’S PRISON EMPIRE (2010); PEW CTR. ON THE STATES, ONE IN 100: BEHIND BARS IN AMERICA 2008 (2008), https://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/legacy/uploadedfiles/ wwwpewtrustsorg/reports/sentencing_and_corrections/onein100pdf.pdf [https://perma.cc/7TNG-SRKC]; PEW CTR. ON THE STATES, ONE IN 31: THE LONG REACH Growing Up in Authoritarian 1950s East LA 1535

OF AMERICAN CORRECTIONS (2009), https://www.pewtrusts.org/- /media/assets/2009/03/02/pspp_1in31_report_final_web_32609.pdf [https://perma. cc/8HP8-V6WV]; JOHN PFAFF, LOCKED IN: THE TRUE CAUSES OF MASS INCARCERATION— AND HOW TO ACHIEVE REAL REFORM (2017); TRAVIS C. PRATT, ADDICTED TO INCARCERATION: CORRECTIONS POLICY AND THE POLITICS OF MISINFORMATION IN THE UNITED STATES (2009); DAVID ALAN SKLANSKY, DEMOCRACY AND THE POLICE (2008); WILLIAM J. STUNTZ, THE COLLAPSE OF AMERICAN CRIMINAL JUSTICE (2011); BERT USEEM & ANNE MORRISON PIEHL, PRISON STATE: THE CHALLENGE OF MASS INCARCERATION (2008); BRUCE WESTERN, HOMEWARD: LIFE IN THE YEAR AFTER PRISON (2018); BRUCE WESTERN, PUNISHMENT AND INEQUALITY IN AMERICA (2006); Devon W. Carbado, From Stopping Black People to Killing Black People: The Fourth Amendment Pathways to Police Violence, 105 CALIF. L. REV. 125 (2017); Devon W. Carbado & Cheryl I. Harris, Undocumented Criminal Procedure, 58 UCLA L. REV. 1543 (2011); Bernard E. Harcourt, United States v. Brignoni-Ponce and United States v. Martinez-Fuerte: The Road to Racial Profiling, in CRIMINAL PROCEDURE STORIES 315 (Carol S. Steiker ed., 2006); Angela Irvine, “We’ve Had Three of Them”: Addressing the Invisibility of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Gender Non- Conforming Youths in the Juvenile Justice System, 19 COLUM. J. GENDER & L. 675 (2010); Kevin R. Johnson, How Racial Profiling Became the Law of the Land: United States v. Brignoni-Ponce and Whren v. United States and the Need for Truly Rebellious Lawyering, 98 GEO. L.J. 1005 (2010); Gerald P. López, How Mainstream Reformers Design Ambitious Reentry Programs Doomed to Fail and Destined to Reinforce Targeted Mass Incarceration and Social Control, 11 HASTINGS RACE & POVERTY L.J. 1 (2014); Symposium, Punishment: The U.S. Record, 74 SOC. RES. 249 (2007); Russell K. Robinson, Masculinity as Prison: Sexual Identity, Race, and Incarceration, 99 CALIF. L. REV. 1309 (2011); Noah D. Zatz, Disparate Impact and the Unity of Equality Law, 96 B.U. L. REV. 1357 (2017). For a sample of the growing literatures on immigration detention centers and jails, see ANDREA ARMSTRONG, DATA CTR., THE IMPACT OF 300 YEARS OF JAIL CONDITIONS (2018), https://s3.amazonaws.com/gnocdc/reports/TDC-prosperity-brief-andrea-arm strong- FINAL.pdf [https://perma.cc/5EVA-N9WU]; JAMES AUSTIN, ROGER OCKER & ROBIN ALLEN, JFA INST., ALTERNATIVES TO INCARCERATION PLAN FOR LOS ANGELES COUNTY: A SAFER AND SMALLER JAIL SYSTEM (2013), https://justicenotjails.org/wp- content/uploads/2013/12/Proposed-Alternatives-to-Incarceration-11252013-Final.pdf [https://perma.cc/6BJZ-K6ZW]; MARK DOW, AMERICAN GULAG: INSIDE U.S. IMMIGRATION PRISONS (2004); HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH, ACLU, NAT’L IMMIGRANT JUSTICE CTR. & DET. WATCH NETWORK, CODE RED: THE FATAL CONSEQUENCES OF DANGEROUSLY SUBSTANDARD MEDICAL CARE IN IMMIGRATION DETENTION (2018), https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/report_pdf/us0618_immigration_web2.pdf [https://perma.cc/X7MM-3Q2D]; HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH, IN THE FREEZER: ABUSIVE CONDITIONS FOR WOMEN AND CHILDREN IN US IMMIGRATION HOLDING CELLS (2018), https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/report_pdf/uscrd0218_web.pdf [https://perma.cc/3UQ5-GVZ6]; MAX HUNTSMAN, OFFICE OF INSPECTOR GEN., CTY. OF L.A., A REVIEW OF THE JAIL VIOLENCE TRACKING AND REPORTING PROCEDURES OF THE LOS ANGELES COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT (2017), http://file.lacounty.gov/ SDSInter/bos/supdocs/116103.pdf [https://perma.cc/ZS 6R-MJRQ]; HOMER VENTERS, LIFE AND DEATH IN RIKERS ISLAND (2019); Nina Rabin, Unseen Prisoners: Women in Immigration Detention Facilities in Arizona, 23 GEO. IMMIGR. L.J. 695 (2009); Azadeh Shahshahani & Ayah Natasha El-Sergany, Challenging the Practice of Solitary Confinement in Immigration Detention in Georgia and Beyond, 16 CUNY L. REV. 243 (2013); Anita Sinha, Arbitrary Detention?: The Immigration Detention Bed Quota, 12 DUKE J. CONST. L. & PUB. POL’Y 77 (2016); Christopher Wildeman, Maria D. Fitzpatrick & Alyssa W. Goldman, Conditions of Confinement in American Prisons and Jails, 14 ANN. REV. L. & SOC. SCI. 29 (2018); Lisa W. Foderaro, New York State May Move to Close Rikers 1536 66 UCLA L. REV. 1532 (2019)

Yet almost none of this is new. Monstrous and destructive as criminal justice is in 2019, especially as enhanced by technological innovations,2 monstrous and destructive as it will likely remain barring a radical transformation, the criminal justice system has long been monstrous and destructive. I do not buy that what we experience today is novel or only of recent vintage.3 I do not because I personally know it is not. Most of what these

Ahead of City’s 10-Year Timeline, N.Y. TIMES (Feb. 14, 2018), https://www.nytimes.com/ 2018/02/14/nyregion/rikers-island-jail-closing-timeline.html [https://perma.cc/PF D4- GJ6V]; Jacqueline Stevens, America’s Secret ICE Castles, NATION (Dec. 16, 2009), https://www.thenation.com/article/americas-secret-ice-castles [https://perma.cc/NT A8-A4KN]; Letter from Jonathan Smith, Chief, Special Litig. Section, Civil Rights Div., U.S. Dep’t of Justice & André Birotte, Jr., U.S. Attorney, Cent. Dist. of Cal., to Anthony Peck, Deputy Cty. Counsel for L.A. Cty. & Stephanie Jo Reagan, Principal Deputy Cty. Counsel, L.A. Cty. Dep’t of Mental Health (June 4, 2014), https://www.justice. gov/sites/default/files/crt/legacy/2014/06/17/lajails_compltr_6-4-14.pdf [https:// perma.cc/REY2-X4VX]; Alice Speri, Detained, Then Violated, INTERCEPT (Apr. 11, 2018, 9:11AM), https://theintercept.com/2018/04/11/immigration-detention-sexual-abuse- ice-dhs [https://perma.cc/VMP3-HP75]; US Inmates Nationwide Strike to Protest ‘Modern Slavery’, BBC (Aug. 21, 2018), https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada- 45261381 [https://perma.cc/UNU3-T375]. 2. For a sample of articles, books, and testimony addressing modern law enforcement’s widespread use of advanced technology, see ANDREW GUTHRIE FERGUSON, THE RISE OF BIG DATA POLICING: SURVEILLANCE, RACE, AND THE FUTURE OF LAW ENFORCEMENT (2017); Sarah Brayne, The Criminal Law and Law Enforcement Implications of Big Data, 14 ANN. REV. L. SOC. SCI. 293 (2018); Andrew D. Selbst, Disparate Impact in Big Data Policing, 52 GA. L. REV. 109 (2017); Mark Puente, LAPD Moving Away Data-Driven Crime Programs Over Potential Racial Bias, L.A. TIMES (Apr. 10, 2019), https://www.latimes. com/local/lanow/la-me-lapd-data-policing-20190410-story.html [https://perma.cc/S N2R-VL23]; SUNITA PATEL, CURTIS SKINNER & ALICIA VIRANI, UCLA SCHOOL OF LAW, TESTIMONY AT THE HEARING REVIEWING DATA-DRIVEN POLICE STRATEGIES BEFORE THE BOARD OF LOS ANGELES POLICE COMMISSION 2–3 (Apr. 9, 2019) (discussing the use of algorithms, artificial intelligence, and heatmaps). For an illustration of how residents of the United States might well use modern data-driven surveillance technologies to hold law enforcement accountable for illegal practices and policies, see Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, The Exclusionary Rule in the Age of Blue Data, 72 VAND. L. REV. 561 (2019). 3. For only one example of claims that the criminal justice system’s techniques are of relatively recent vintage, see CHARLES R. EPP, STEVEN MAYNARD-MOODY & DONALD HAIDER-MARKEL, PULLED OVER: HOW POLICE STOPS DEFINE RACE AND CITIZENSHIP 8 (2014) (claiming that investigatory stops—and their immediate descendants stop-and- frisks and knock-and-talks—have been around for decades but did not become a “core tactic” until the 1980s). By the 1950s, such stops, according to my parents and their friends, had already been long established as the norm in East LA. If relying on legal authorization on the books, law enforcement officers most often invoked California Penal Code section 647—a catchall statutory license that, in the 1950s, remained nearly identical to its prototype passed in 1872. The original statute explicitly targets “Digger Indians” and “persons” commonly known as “Greasers” or the issue of “Spanish and Indian blood,” but from its initial passage, law enforcement officers used section 647 as legal authority to do as they pleased while rarely, if ever, being held legally accountable. For a helpful discussion of section 647 and other such statutes, see Arthur H. Sherry, Vagrants, Rogues, and Vagabonds—Old Concepts in Need of Revision, 48 CALIF. L. REV. Growing Up in Authoritarian 1950s East LA 1537

networks of systems, institutions, and individuals do in 2019 is not different at all from what they did in dealing with those of us who lived in East LA in the 1950s (and in earlier decades still). Indeed, what feels eerie for someone like me, and perhaps for others who lived within targeted communities during earlier eras, is how the present is utterly reminiscent of the past. Already in my boyhood years, already in 1950s East LA, the criminal justice system routinely worked in tandem with other systems. Already in my boyhood years, diverse combinations of public, private, and civic actors combined with the criminal justice and other systems, all networked in varied ways to do with us as they liked. Already in my boyhood years, these networks of systems, institutions, and individuals—through their practices—had condemned Mexicans (Mexicanness) as criminal.4 Or at least this is the way I

557 (1960). Later experiences taught me these same policing techniques remained the norm in other targeted communities, including parts of San Diego, where I started my practice in 1975 and where, at least into the early 1980s, law enforcement officers regularly employed section 647 to surveil and control people of color. See Kolender v. Lawson, 461 U.S. 352 (1983); Sheri Lynn Johnson, Race and the Decision to Detain a Suspect, 93 YALE. L.J. 214 (1983); Dan Stormer & Paul Bernstein, The Impact of Kolender v. Lawson on Law Enforcement and Minority Groups, 12 HASTINGS CONST. L.Q. 105 (1984). 4. I have used this term “Mexicanness” for as long as I can remember, and I have been unable to trace its exact origins. Of the prominent chroniclers of the 1950s and the decades leading up to them, perhaps Carey McWilliams comes closest to suggesting my own views about the routine condemnation of Mexicans and Mexicanness. See, e.g., CAREY MCWILLIAMS, FACTORIES IN THE FIELD: THE STORY OF MIGRATORY FARM LABOR IN CALIFORNIA (1935); CAREY MCWILLIAMS, NORTH FROM MEXICO: THE SPANISH-SPEAKING PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES (Praeger 3d ed. 2016) (1948). Because so few these days, at least in my experience, have been exposed to the work of McWilliams, for a sample of still more of his many important contributions, see CAREY MCWILLIAMS, AMBROSE BIERCE: A BIOGRAPHY (1929); CAREY MCWILLIAMS, BROTHERS UNDER THE SKIN (1943); CAREY MCWILLIAMS, THE CALIFORNIA REVOLUTION (1968); CAREY MCWILLIAMS, CALIFORNIA: THE GREAT EXCEPTION (1949); CAREY MCWILLIAMS, ILL FARES THE LAND: MIGRANTS AND MIGRATORY LABOR IN THE UNITED STATES (1942); CAREY MCWILLIAMS, A MASK FOR PRIVILEGE: ANTI-SEMITISM IN AMERICA (Routledge 2017) (1948); CAREY MCWILLIAMS, THE MEXICANS IN AMERICA: A STUDENTS’ GUIDE TO LOCALIZED HISTORY (1968); CAREY MCWILLIAMS, PREJUDICE: JAPANESE-AMERICANS: SYMBOL OF RACIAL INTOLERANCE (1944), https://archive.org/details/prejudicejapanes008160mbp; CAREY MCWILLIAMS, COUNTRY: AN ISLAND ON THE LAND (Gibbs Smith report. ed. 1973) (1946); CAREY MCWILLIAMS, WITCH HUNT: THE REVIVAL OF HERESY (1950). For an unpublished undergraduate thesis that includes variations on the theme of condemned Mexicanness, see Regan Adele Zscheile, Ya Estamos Hartos: The Struggle for Mexican American Labor and Civil Rights in California During the New Deal Era (Apr. 2015) (unpublished B.A. thesis, Acadia University) (on file with author). Pop culture, of course, has borrowed from and fortified the condemnation of Mexicanness in various ways. In the 1960s, for example, Frito-Lay advertised its products using the “Frito Bandito,” a “sombrero-toting stereotypical mascot”: 1538 66 UCLA L. REV. 1532 (2019)

began to make sense of what we were enduring. To be Mexican (Mexican American, ) was to be depraved, deviant, delinquent, pathological, dangerously threatening, threateningly dangerous—always and forever genetically and culturally inferior, less than fully human, to be controlled by whatever means necessary.5 I understand what I am emphasizing. If 2019 feels eerily reminiscent of my boyhood days in 1950s East LA, it means my generation failed in our efforts to change the world. I do not buy that we shot too high. I do not buy that our radicalism ought instead to have focused singularly on levelheaded incrementalism. I certainly do not buy that many people did not give all of themselves. Yet, for all the efforts of some extraordinary people, for all the lives lost, for all the bodies and spirits beaten and broken, for all the sacrifices made, for all the bold creativity, for all the grit demonstrated, for all the perseverance shown, we did not come close to what we openly declared to be our aim. And what we see today means, even more pointedly, that I personally have failed wildly more than I have ever succeeded. In aspiring to transform

Speaking broken English and robbing unsuspecting bystanders of their Frito’s corn chips, the Bandito character was drawn as a cartoon Mexican con man with a disheveled appearance and a gold tooth. The Bandito was also featured in several print ads which depicted the character on wanted posters. The ad warns the consumer, “Caution: he loves crunchy Fritos corn chips so much he’ll stop at nothing to get yours. What’s more, he’s cunning, clever—and sneaky!” The ad also warns citizens to protect themselves. The ad clearly labels the Bandito as not only a dangerous immigrant, but it reinforces the commonly held stereotype about Mexicans that they are lazy—the Bandito prefers to steal, rather than work. SMITHSONIAN AM. ART MUSEUM, STEREOTYPES AND POPULAR CULTURE (2015), http://americanexperience.si.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Stereotypes-and- Popular-Culture.pdf [https://perma.cc/9RD7-LUTR]. 5. To control by whatever means necessary has included violence against Mexicans of every imaginable form, including lynchings, which, despite the quality work of a small number of scholars, remain largely unappreciated and unacknowledged by most scholars and unknown to most people who live in the United States. See e.g., WILLIAM D. CARRIGAN & CLIVE WEBB, FORGOTTEN DEAD: MOB VIOLENCE AGAINST MEXICANS IN THE UNITED STATES, 1848–1928 (2013); KEN GONZALES-DAY, LYNCHING IN THE WEST: 1850–1935 (2006); William D. Carrigan & Clive Webb, Muerto por Unos Desconocidos (Killed by Persons Unknown): Mob Violence Against Blacks and Mexicans, in BEYOND BLACK AND WHITE: RACE, ETHNICITY, AND GENDER IN THE U.S. SOUTH AND SOUTHWEST 35–74 (Stephanie Cole & Alison Parker eds., 2004). In a recently published, well-documented study of the lynching of Mexicans in the Texas borderlands by diverse Whites in the United States (including law enforcement officers, armed posses, and government- protected vigilantes), extending from the mid-nineteenth century through at least the end of World War I, Nicholas Villanueva Jr. observes these Mexican victims “were largely guilty of one unifying ‘crime’—being Mexican.” NICHOLAS VILLANUEVA, JR., THE LYNCHINGS OF MEXICANS IN THE TEXAS BORDERLANDS 1 (2017). Growing Up in Authoritarian 1950s East LA 1539

the world (a chunk or a place or a situation or an institution at a time), I have aimed directly to change the criminal justice system. I have had the joy and the honor of working with some of the most wonderful people imaginable. Still, you are looking at someone who has gotten his butt kicked. Gotten his butt kicked all across the United States and in other countries too. Clients I have represented, mobilizations I have helped lead, movements I have been a part of have lost far more often than won. There is such a thing as “winning through losing,” but, together with others, I have often just gotten my butt kicked.6 Understand, please, what else it means that 2019 methods for targeting low-income, of color, and immigrant communities across the United States replicate 1950s methods for governing the residents of East LA. When diverse networks of systems, institutions, and individuals treat entire communities as less than fully human criminals, they are calling each group an “exception.”7 Within the rule of law in constitutional democracies, to declare a group an exception is to insist practices pursued by networks—every system, every institution, every individual, especially in concert—can legitimately treat those who make up the exception any way, or nearly any way, whatsoever. And to declare a group an exception is to proclaim these practices shall not be called into question or at least readily disputed through established means. Those who are part of these exceptional groups, and their allies too, have little to no opportunity to frontally challenge through official channels

6. See GERALD P. LÓPEZ, REBELLIOUS LAWYERING: ONE CHICANO’S VISION OF PROGRESSIVE LAW PRACTICE (1992) [hereinafter REBELLIOUS LAWYERING]; Douglas NeJaime, Winning Through Losing, 96 IOWA L. REV. 941 (2010). 7. The seminal work in democratic theory about the state of exception remains CARL SCHMITT, POLITICAL THEOLOGY: FOUR CHAPTERS ON THE CONCEPT OF SOVEREIGNTY (George Schwab trans., MIT Press 1985) (1922). Schmitt’s ideas influenced many across disciplines, professions, and national boundaries—though for the longest time, largely outside the United States, at least until 9/11. For a modern influential treatment of Schmitt’s political theory by the Italian theorist Giorgio Agamben, see GIORGIO AGAMBEN, HOMO SACER: SOVEREIGN POWER AND BARE LIFE (Daniel Heller-Roazen trans., 1998) (1995), https://www.thing.net/~rdom/ucsd/biopolitics/HomoSacer.pdf [https://perma.cc/5ML4-DCDM]; GIORGIO AGAMBEN, STATE OF EXCEPTION (Kevin Attell trans., 2005) (2003). For worthy book-length treatments in English, see JOSEPH W. BENDERSKY, CARL SCHMITT: THEORIST FOR THE REICH (1983); ELLEN KENNEDY, CONSTITUTIONAL FAILURE: CARL SCHMITT IN WEIMAR (2004); LAW AS POLITICS: CARL SCHMITT’S CRITIQUE OF LIBERALISM (David Dyzenhaus ed., 1998). Though my own views about the exception diverge considerably from Schmitt’s, his contributions have proven indispensable to my varied efforts to elaborate on the experience of living within the rule of law in a constitutional democracy. See, e.g., Gerald P. López, Don’t We Like Them Illegal?, 45 U.C. DAVIS L. REV. 1711 (2012) [hereinafter Don’t We Like Them Illegal?]. For an accounting of the attention paid to Schmitt’s work in law reviews in the United States from 1980 to 2010, see David Luban, Carl Schmitt and the Critique of Lawfare, 48 CASE W. RES. J. INT’L L. 457, 468 (2010). 1540 66 UCLA L. REV. 1532 (2019)

either particular practices or the networked systems, institutions, and individuals pursuing them. Indeed, part of what it means to declare a group an exception is to aim to incapacitate holding anyone responsible, both before and after the fact. Sabotaging accountability can be understood as the defining drive of authoritarianism.8 I appreciate that I am emphatically disagreeing with familiar and foundational orthodoxies. To present just some of what growing up in East LA helped me regard as indisputably real: I am insisting that in the United States groups can be and have been regarded and treated as exceptions without a formal declaration by the executive proclaiming a state of emergency. I am insisting that targeting exceptions like the residents of 1950s East LA through networked practices— and not emergency periods—defines the paradigmatic instance of authoritarian practices.9 I am insisting that, across history, the targeting of exceptions can be discerned across the United States (and its colonies and outposts, for that matter)10 and provides distinctive that the presence of an exception morally and practically requires, both through and within law, widespread evasion of accountability and enthusiastic endorsement of authoritarianism.

8. According to Schmitt, a sovereign’s ability to label a group an exception requires, by definition, not being held accountable for his decision to label and his decisions about what to do about and with the exception. In Schmitt’s formulation (though not in my own), the sovereign formally suspends the very accountability ostensibly at the heart of constitutional democracies. See SCHMITT, supra note 7, at 12. For the use of the term “sabotaging accountability” and for a challenge to political scientists to focus primarily on practices rather than on elections and personalities in defining authoritarianism, a perspective more in line with my own, see Marlies Glasius, What Authoritarianism Is . . . and Is Not: A Practice Perspective, 94 INT’L AFFS. 515 (2018). 9. A range of accomplished scholars assert or certainly appear to regard emergency powers as the paradigmatic case of authoritarianism within the rule of law in a constitutional democracy. See, e.g., David Cole, The Priority of Morality: The Emergency Constitution’s Blind Spot, 113 YALE L.J. 1753 (2004); Kim Lane Scheppele, Law in a Time of Emergency: States of Exception and the Temptations of 9/11, 6 U. PA. J. CONST. L. 1001 (2004). 10. Scholars who label their work Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) make the convincing claim that we cannot understand the exception and the state of emergency without closely examining the history of the oppressed across the globe, particularly through the mechanisms of colonialism—while declaring, at the same time, colonialism should not be regarded as all-encompassing. See, e.g., JOHN REYNOLDS, EMPIRE, EMERGENCY, AND INTERNATIONAL LAW (2017). For a seminal work in this TWAIL tradition, particularly emphasizing the state of emergency as more structure than event, see PATRICK WOLFE, SETTLER COLONIALISM AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF ANTHROPOLOGY: THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF AN ETHNOGRAPHIC EVENT (1999). Growing Up in Authoritarian 1950s East LA 1541

I am insisting that all those who define authoritarianism as in violation of or abhorrent to the rule of law in constitutional democracies are wrong.11 They conflate their own preferred vision of the choices we ought to make with the options the rule of law makes available, regards as vitally important, and often puts into action. Instead, they ought to understand that authoritarian practices—every bit as much as the accountability practices at the other end of the same spectrum—are a legitimate expression of the rule of law in the United States and, I believe, in every constitutional democracy. I am insisting that law is not merely a byproduct or a result of other forces (epiphenomenal) but instead a porous and separable realm influenced by and shaping other porous and separable realms (social, political, economic, cultural).12 Like every porous and separable realm, the rule of law entails seemingly endless contradictory options (severe authoritarianism versus robust accountability being a huge one) brought to life by the discretionary choices we all make within networks of systems, institutions, and individuals.13 I am insisting that the availability of these clashing options cannot be eliminated or avoided. Even the most exquisitely designed constitution and carefully nurtured constitutional culture shall never eradicate the opportunity,

11. For a valuable elaboration of the rule of law as seen across eras, ideologies, and disciplines, and for the overlapping views of many prominent thinkers, see the first of Rick Abel’s wonderful two-volume masterpiece, RICHARD L. ABEL, LAW’S WARS: THE FATE OF THE RULE OF LAW IN THE US “WAR ON TERROR” (2018). 12. Though my views track back to my earliest years, as this Article again confirms, the published piece first embodying this understanding is Gerald P. López, Undocumented Mexican Migration: In Search of a Just and Policy, 28 UCLA L. REV. 615 (1981) [hereinafter Undocumented Mexican Migration]. 13. While all my work on professional lawyering depicts and explores this view, many deserve great credit for developing compatible lines of thoughts, from clusters of clients and problem-solving practitioners with whom I have collaborated to faculty members and students and administrators with whom I have created various coordinated and sequenced curricular offerings. Of those who have published their views, fundamental reads produced by legal scholars include ANTHONY G. AMSTERDAM & JEROME BRUNER, MINDING THE LAW (2000); PHILIP BOBBITT, CONSTITUTIONAL FATE: THEORY OF THE CONSTITUTION (1982); DUNCAN KENNEDY, LEGAL REASONING: COLLECTED ESSAYS (2008); STEVEN L. WINTER, A CLEARING IN THE FOREST: LAW, LIFE, AND MIND (2001); J.M. Balkin, The Crystalline Structure of Legal Thought, 39 RUTGERS L. REV. 1 (1986); Felix S. Cohen, Transcendental Nonsense and the Functional Approach, 35 COLUM. L. REV. 809 (1935); Clare Dalton, An Essay in the Deconstruction of Contract Doctrine, 94 YALE L.J. 997 (1985); Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Privilege, Malice, and Intent, 8 HARV. L. REV. 1 (1894); Karl N. Llewellyn, Remarks on the Theory of Appellate Decision and the Rules or Canons About How Statutes Are to Be Construed, 3 VAND. L. REV. 395 (1950); Frances E. Olsen, The Family and the Market: A Study of Ideology and Legal Reform, 96 HARV. L. REV. 1497 (1983); Roberto Mangabeira Unger, The Critical Legal Studies Movement, 96 HARV. L. REV. 561 (1983); J.M. Balkin, Nested Oppositions, 99 YALE L.J. 1669 (1990) (book review). 1542 66 UCLA L. REV. 1532 (2019)

within the rule of law, to target exceptions.14 We desire to preserve within the rule of law, as we desire to maintain in all of life (including within every other separable realm), the choice to do as we please or nearly as we please in dealing with exceptions often, though not always, for racist reasons. Even those of us who believe power ought to be held robustly accountable wish to preserve the right to opt out, though we may disavow this desire, even to ourselves. I am insisting that those of us who believe in eliminating domination and constraining power should celebrate whenever targeted exceptions and their allies fight back and find successes. We should pay careful attention to the various means through which targeted exceptions manage to hold power accountable, including when they fight through law. Yet the fact that targeted exceptions sometimes use law and the fact that they sometimes win through law do not at all mean we should venerate the rule of law or regard the U.S. Constitution as sacred.15 The back and forth between authoritarian and accountability practices do not offer convincing proof about the arc of history.16 Nor does it tell us that we live within a phony rule of law in an inauthentic constitutional democracy (though it can help us learn to spot fake and counterfeit behavior). Instead the back and forth are cycles we should expect, even if we cannot entirely anticipate them. The particular cycles express the dynamics of endless struggles expressed through and within a particular rule of law in a particular constitutional democracy. No matter what regime we establish and aim to improve, however, we would end up living within a rule of law permeated by contradictory options. There’s no escaping ourselves. *** Very few agree with me, I understand. And I am not trying to convince. I am here to speak the truth as I lived it, the truth as I have studied it, and the

14. For a list of experts advising countries on constitutional design and for skepticism about this process, see Mark Tushnet, Some Skepticism About Normative Constitutional Advice, 49 WM. & MARY L. REV. 1473 (2008); Jennifer Widner, Constitution Writing in Post- Conflict Settings: An Overview, 49 WM. & MARY L. REV. 1513 (2008). 15. For decades, I have expressed this view, through a range of work. For two short articles, see Gerald P. López, The Idea of a Constitution in the Chicano Tradition, 37 J. LEGAL EDUC. 162 (1987); Gerald P. López, A Declaration of War by Other Means, 98 HARV. L. REV. 1667 (1985) (book review). 16. I respectfully disagree with Martin Luther King, Jr.’s frequently invoked conviction that, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go From Here?, Address at the Eleventh Annual Southern Christian Leadership Conference Convention (Aug. 16, 1967), https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/ king-papers/documents/where-do-we-go-here-address-delivered-eleventh-annual-sclc- convention [https://perma.cc/F7HA-2UHG]. Growing Up in Authoritarian 1950s East LA 1543

truth as I understand it about 1950s East LA. Others may come to similar conclusions by reading and thinking deeply about constitutional democracies across the globe or by working with targeted populations regarded and treated as exceptions.17 I came to see this as truth, at least initially, by growing up in a neighborhood where authoritarian practices pervaded space, movement, interactions with systems, relationships with private and civic and public networks, connections with others, and ideas about ourselves. I offer the barest glimpse inside one boy’s life growing up in authoritarian 1950s East LA—the feelings and ideas of the boy I remember, from the inside and through the eyes of those who knew me well, during those years and as the decades have unfolded. I am focusing on East LA for yet another reason, though. Very little published about the criminal justice system focuses on Latinx communities, including East LA. Over the past six months, I have poured over hundreds of books and an even larger number of articles, public and private and civic reports, dissertations, and unpublished manuscripts. I had already read roughly 80 percent of these materials, but I reread the familiar materials as carefully as I studied what I had never before consumed. Across all disciplines and professions, only a small number regard what happened in East LA or in other Latinx communities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially before the mid-1960s, as relevant to illuminating the 2019 criminal justice system.18

17. For just one example in the contemporary literature, see ALICE GOFFMAN, ON THE RUN: FUGITIVE LIFE IN AN AMERICAN CITY (2014). Goffman’s book takes its place among ethnographies I have found especially illuminating. See, e.g., ELIJAH ANDERSON, A PLACE ON THE CORNER (2d ed. 2003) (1976); ELIJAH ANDERSON, CODE OF THE STREET: DECENCY, VIOLENCE, AND THE MORAL LIFE OF THE INNER CITY (1999); JESSICA R. CATTELINO, HIGH STAKES: FLORIDA SEMINOLE GAMING AND SOVEREIGNTY (2008); ANNE FADIMAN, THE SPIRIT CATCHES YOU AND YOU FALL DOWN: A HMONG CHILD, HER AMERICAN DOCTORS, AND THE COLLISION OF TWO CULTURES (1997); CAROL J. GREENHOUSE, BARBARA YNGVESSON, & DAVID M. ENGEL, LAW AND COMMUNITY IN THREE AMERICAN TOWNS (1994); ADRIAN NICOLE LEBLANC, RANDOM FAMILY: LOVE, DRUGS, TROUBLE, AND COMING OF AGE IN THE BRONX (2003); NED POLSKY, HUSTLERS, BEATS, AND OTHERS (Routledge 2017) (1967); PIRI THOMAS, DOWN THESE MEAN STREETS (Vintage Books ed. 1997) (1967); SUDHIR ALLADI VENKATESH, OFF THE BOOKS: THE UNDERGROUND ECONOMY OF THE URBAN POOR (2006); Américo Paredes, On Ethnographic Work Among Minority Groups: A Folklorist’s Perspective, 6 NEW SCHOLAR 1 (1977). For an influential account of ethnography across disciplines and roles, see RENATO ROSALDO, CULTURE & TRUTH: THE REMAKING OF SOCIAL ANALYSIS (1989). 18. For an insightful treatment, too seldom discussed, of how criminology contributed to the image of Mexican as criminal and the operation of the criminal justice system, see Larry D. Trujillo, “La Evolución del ‘Bandido’ al ‘’”: A Critical Examination and Evaluation of Criminological Literature on , 9 ISSUES CRIMINOLOGY 43 (1974). 1544 66 UCLA L. REV. 1532 (2019)

Indeed, in recent years, the experience of Latinx communities appears to be regarded by many writers as limited to and identical with the experience of recent immigrants. Perhaps we should expect to find that sort of cultivated ignorance among shallow and narrow thinkers. But, revealingly, we can find the same uninformed claims made by top-notch scholars who otherwise research deeply and write insightfully about the history and contemporary practices of criminal justice. In any event, I remain baffled by the myopia. I am no longer, however, surprised by the neglect. Having tried many times over the decades to challenge this disregard,19 I know I cannot correct the past or even influence the present. But I can do my best not to be complicit. I could describe varied Latinx communities I know well in New York and Chicago and Miami, across the Southwest—particularly in New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona. And I could describe others still I have come to know up and down and across California—San Diego, the Bay Area, Fresno, Riverside, the Imperial and the San Joaquin Valleys. But I know East LA best, or at least I knew it first. And growing up in 1950s East LA shaped impressions that helped me see lucidly, or at least not at all to recoil from, what initially felt utterly puzzling and enraging. Time and again, life proves we cannot separate who we are from what we try to understand.20

I. 1950S EAST LA

When I talk East LA, I mean East LA as many residents in the 1950s understood it, not how census officials or journalists map it, much less how today’s real estate agents market the Eastside. In the old-school sense, if you are driving east, say, on Olympic Boulevard, First Street, or Avenue (Brooklyn Avenue during the 1950s), as soon as you cross the LA River, you are in East LA. The great majority of East LA is unincorporated, formally governed by the County Board of Supervisors and the County Sheriff (with only Boyle Heights belonging to the City of LA), and informally ruled by networks of prominent institutions and enterprises—most notably the Catholic Church, the Chamber of Commerce, the industrial and housing sectors, the public health system, banking and savings and loans, the California

19. For only some of many examples, see Gerald P. López, Learning About Latinos, 19 CHICANO- L. REV. 363 (1998) [hereinafter Learning About Latinos]; Gerald P. López, We Should Be Counted, NEWSWEEK, Nov. 2, 1992, at 12. 20. See López, The Idea of a Constitution in the Chicano Tradition, supra note 15. Growing Up in Authoritarian 1950s East LA 1545

Highway Patrol, the Los Angeles Police Department, and of course the immigration and education and criminal justice systems.21 My East LA is bordered on the south by City of Vernon and City of Commerce, on the east by Monterey Park and Montebello, and on the north by the outer boundaries of City Terrace. In my 1950s East LA, there lived roughly 100,000 residents.22 And in my neighborhood and adjacent neighborhoods we Mexicans lived alongside African Americans, Chinese, Japanese, Armenians, Jews, Russians, Italians, Filipinos, Basques, and Irish. Already East LA included the largest concentration of Mexicans anywhere in Los Angeles or in California.23 The percentage of Mexicans may even have exceeded—though census data does not permit us to be at all certain—the percentage of Latinx in New York City’s East (Spanish) Harlem or Lower East Side and perhaps even rivaled the percentage of Mexicans in border cities like El Paso, Texas, and Las Cruces, New Mexico.

A. As a Very Young Child, Living on Eastman Avenue Between Olympic Boulevard and Union Pacific Avenue, Immediately Adjacent to the Blacktop Playground of Eastman Avenue Elementary School

1. Ages 1–4

 I had no idea most people did not look up and see deep dark skies. Deep and dark not because rain was about to fall but because deep dark was the

21. These and many other features of my East LA can be discovered in the interdisciplinary literature. See, e.g., ALBERT CAMARILLO, CHICANOS IN CALIFORNIA: A HISTORY OF IN CALIFORNIA (1984); IAN F. HANEY LÓPEZ, ON TRIAL: THE CHICANO FIGHT FOR JUSTICE (2003); ALFREDO MIRANDÉ & EVANGELINA ENRÍQUEZ, LA CHICANA: THE MEXICAN-AMERICAN WOMAN (1979); RICARDO ROMO, EAST LOS ANGELES: HISTORY OF A BARRIO (1983); GEORGE J. SÁNCHEZ, BECOMING MEXICAN AMERICAN: ETHNICITY, CULTURE, AND IDENTITY IN CHICANO LOS ANGELES, 1900–1945 (1993); George J. Sánchez, “What’s Good for Boyle Heights is Good for the Jews”: Creating Multiracialism on the Eastside During the 1950s, 56 AM. Q. 633 (2004). 22. Census data do not allow for confident assessments, but the librarians at UCLA, under the leadership of Kevin Gerson, generously offered to undertake their own analyses from various sources, providing me unpublished data otherwise unavailable, for which I am deeply grateful. By the 1960s, various reports began focusing on East LA and other targeted communities like South Los Angeles. See, e.g., DIV. OF FAIR EMP’T PRACTICES, CAL. DEP’T OF INDUS. RELATIONS, NEGROES AND MEXICAN AMERICANS IN SOUTH AND EAST LOS ANGELES: CHANGES BETWEEN 1960 AND 1965 IN POPULATION, EMPLOYMENT, INCOME, AND FAMILY STATUS (1966). 23. This certainly has long been the consensus view. See, e.g., RODOLFO F. ACUÑA, A COMMUNITY UNDER SIEGE: A CHRONICLE OF CHICANOS EAST OF THE LOS ANGELES RIVER 1945–1975 (1984). 1546 66 UCLA L. REV. 1532 (2019)

color of the soot we all breathed in, the photochemical, hazy, eye-irritating gunk deep in the lungs of kids like me who played outdoors almost every waking hour.24  I had no idea most people did not live right next door to a broom manufacturing plant (with huge feral tomcats roaming around to battle huge rats who fed off the stiff grasses used to make the brooms), much less that most neighborhoods did not include slaughterhouses, dumpsites, and industry of all sorts (tire and rubber, iron and steel, battery production), unregulated and free to do as they pleased, producing putrid stench, lead contamination, and who knows what else, causing severe headaches, nausea, respiratory problems, and, as it would turn out, so much more.25  I had no idea most people did not find themselves surrounded by cars, much less live in a state where by 1945 there were about three million cars, by 1950 five million, and by 1956 seven million.26 Most people did not live in the metropolitan area that was by far in the lead in this dubious race, with motor vehicle registrations growing faster than the population and gasoline consumption growing faster than motor vehicle registration.27  I had no idea most people did not live in a neighborhood crisscrossed by a maze of freeways (the Arroyo Seco, the Santa Ana, the Hollywood, the Pomona, the Golden State, the Long Beach), most intersecting at the East Los Angeles Interchange, all built by displacing the people who had once lived on that land, all imposing on those who remained the considerable pain of the destruction of homes, the construction of highways, and the loss of neighbors.28

24. For a knowledgeable account of how networks of public, civic, and private institutions and individuals discovered the smog problem, how they learned it affected various areas differently, and how they dealt with it in California from 1940–75, see JAMES E. KRIER & EDMUND URSIN, POLLUTION AND POLICY (1977). 25. For how marketing boosters of sun-drenched, tree-lined, beach- and mountain-bounded White Los Angeles dealt with the realities of Southern California’s Mexican history, its Mexican and Mexican American populations, the segregated barrios Mexicans and Mexican Americans lived in, and its architecture and aesthetics, see WILLIAM DEVERELL, WHITEWASHED ADOBE: THE RISE OF LOS ANGELES AND THE REMAKING OF ITS MEXICAN PAST (2004). For earlier periods in Los Angeles history, when the plague caused by living conditions in Los Angeles, including rats infesting industrial areas, was attributed to the biological inferiority of disease-carrying Mexicans, see Natalia Molina, Borders, Laborers, and Racialized Medicalization: Mexican Immigration and US Public Health Practices in the 20th Century, 101 AM. J. PUB. HEALTH 1024 (2011). 26. See Krier & Ursin, supra note 24, at 91. 27. For an account of discovering and documenting the automobile’s role in producing smog, see id. at 77–101. 28. Nathan Masters provides a short and revealing depiction of the process of locating and building these freeways: Growing Up in Authoritarian 1950s East LA 1547

 I had no idea most people living in LA would not get sick from just living where they lived, working where they worked, playing where they played. If during these years I had learned we in East LA could get sick and even die prematurely, I would have assumed everyone in LA faced the same risks roughly to the same degree. And I would have thought we all have played more or less equal roles in creating these dangers and had become more or less equally vulnerable to the harmful effects we had produced. Even if the term “pollution equities” had existed and been defined for me in the early 1950s, I doubt I would have grasped that Latinos and Blacks suffer disproportionately from pollution and consume considerably less than Whites of the diverse goods polluting industries produce.29

In mostly uninhabited Sepulveda Canyon, only the mountains could complain. But many Southland freeways bludgeoned their way through heavily urbanized areas, inflicting the same degree of trauma not to landscapes but to communities. No area was more affected than L.A.’s Eastside, where transportation planners routed seven freeways directly through residential communities. Starting in 1948, bulldozers cleared wide urban gashes through the multiethnic but mostly Latino neighborhoods of Boyle Heights, Lincoln Heights, and East L.A., demolishing thousands of buildings and evicting homeowners from their property. And the freeways didn’t just displace people and businesses. They balkanized the community, making strangers out of neighbors and discouraging urban cohesion. A freeway can be an intimidating thing to cross on foot. Residents did fight back, flooding public meetings and picketing construction sites. But unlike the mostly white and politically powerful neighborhoods that killed plans for a Beverly Hills Freeway, L.A.’s Eastside couldn’t stop the bulldozer. By the early 1960s, all seven of the planners’ freeways crisscrossed the community. Five of them tangled together at the East Los Angeles Interchange. Built to provide northbound motorists with a bypass around central Los Angeles, this imposing (and for drivers, often confusing) complex of 30 bridges occupies 135 acres of land—including part of once-idyllic Hollenbeck Park. At the time of its completion in 1961, it was the largest single project ever undertaken by the state’s division of highways. Yet somehow, despite its grand scale and enormous cost, the interchange—like much of the freeway system—is often paralyzed today with traffic, as a procession of trucks and automobiles crawls along the old urban scars. Nathan Masters, They Moved Mountains (And People) to Build LA’s Freeways, GIZMODO (Mar. 17, 2014, 2:30 PM) (citations omitted), https://gizmodo.com/they-moved- mountains-and-people-to-build-l-a-s-freew-1544225573 [https://perma.cc/5KXA- JBB3]. 29. Interdisciplinary scholars now provide proof of these and many other claims about the impact of and responsibility for generating pollution. For only a small, revealing sample of a large literature, see Christopher W. Tessum et al., Inequity in Consumption of Goods and Services Adds to Racial-Ethnic Disparities in Air Pollution Exposure, 116 PROC. NAT’L ACAD. SCI. 6001 (2019); see also Univ. of Minn., US Black and Hispanic Minorities Bear Disproportionate Burden From Air Pollution, SCI. DAILY (Mar. 11, 2019) (citing id.), 1548 66 UCLA L. REV. 1532 (2019)

 I had no idea that the better paying jobs in the industries located within and adjacent to where we lived were for Whites who most often lived some distance from East LA and that even the bottom-rung jobs most likely went to Whites, again most often living far away from East LA. At least at this early age, I could not have imagined that, over sixty years later, we finally now have sophisticated studies finding that the presence of many industries in places like East LA leads to only slightly more bottom-rung jobs and negligible better-paying jobs. The so-called moral tradeoff turns out to be, for the great majority living in targeted neighborhoods of color, a fancy term amounting to an inaccurate empirical and ethical portrayal of what happened in the 1950s and what happens today. Even with the help of my parents, at this point in my life, I am not certain I could get just how routinely we create certain myths—circulate prominent lies—to justify what otherwise can be transparently understood as yet another way to target exceptions.30  I had no idea most people did not have cops, again and again, driving up and down every street, sometimes up into private driveways and onto school playgrounds and park playing fields, always asking the creepiest questions, often knocking on the doors of houses and apartments “just to talk,” all of course without explanation. The cops were just “tracking us,” as folks would say, where we lived and worked and went to school, who we hung with and played with, what we did in parks and playgrounds and bathrooms.31

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/03/190311152735.htm [https://perma.cc/ S28L-QYKC] 30. For a valuable illustration of modern literature closely examining racial differences in employment in industries and the related vulnerability to pollution, see Michael Ash & James K. Boyce, Racial Disparities in Pollution Exposure and Employment at US Industrial Facilities, 115 PROC. OF NAT’L ACAD. SCI. 10636 (2018). 31. Tracking, or the more common term “surveilling,” traces its modern prominence in diverse literatures to the work of Michel Foucault, perhaps most prominently MICHEL FOUCAULT, DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH (Alan Sheridan trans., Vintage Books 2d ed. 1995) (1977). For an early exploration of Foucault’s work in the United States, see HUBERT L. DREYFUS & PAUL RABINO, MICHEL FOUCAULT: BEYOND STRUCTURALISM AND HERMENEUTICS (2d ed. 1983). For excellent elaborations of Foucault’s ideas within the lawyering and law literatures in the United States, see ALAN HUNT & GARY WICKHAM, FOUCAULT AND LAW: TOWARD A AS GOVERNANCE (1994); Duncan Kennedy, The Stakes of Law, or Hale and Foucault!, 15 LEGAL STUD. F. 327 (1991); Ascanio Piomelli, Foucault’s Approach to Power: Its Allure and Limits for Collaborative Lawyering, 2004 UTAH L. REV. 395. For a recent treatment of surveillance as central to today’s criminal justice system, both the social processes that comprise the system’s daily activities and the forms of control over individuals and communities, see Kathryne M. Young & Joan Petersilia, Keeping Track: Surveillance, Growing Up in Authoritarian 1950s East LA 1549

 I had no idea most people did not have so many government employees messing with them, their families, and their neighbors—cops and immigration officials and truant officers, of course, and teachers, nurses, and postal workers. It was not just government employees but bank employees we went to for loans, foremen we worked under, and landlords we rented from. And all these and still other people messed with us confidently knowing that not doing their jobs for us was, indeed, part of doing their jobs well.32  I had no idea most people did not raise chickens and pigeons in a backyard coop, did not vigilantly protect their pets from rats and tomcats, did not enjoy seeing their chickens wander in the yard and their pigeons (homers and tumblers) play magical games in the air, did not flock to watch old and new movies at their local theatres (the Center, the Boulevard, and the Golden Gate on Whittier Boulevard), did not see Pedro Infante and Jorge Negrete perform live at the Million Dollar Theatre, did not buy fresh fruit and vegetables from outdoor stands, did not head to Clifton’s Cafeteria on Saturdays, did not eat fresh menudo, tamales, and tortillas from the tortilleria around the corner, did not have older kids on the playground from whom to learn every sport (from football to caroms to baseball to tether ball to suicide to jump rope to forward and back flips off the big swing).  I had no idea most people did not have a Mom and Dad who made their children feel totally safe, totally loved, totally like they could do absolutely whatever they wanted to do in the world. My Dad and Mom somehow did all that even when money was scarce, the roof was leaking, and the plumbing backing up, even while having both sets of grandparents living with us in a rented small two-bedroom house, a place where my brothers’

Control, and the Expansion of the Carceral State, 129 HARV. L. REV. 1318 (2016) (book review). 32. While the literatures do not offer direct and substantial scholarly support for our experiences in the 1950s, the first modern wave of PhD candidates began producing relevant dissertations. See, e.g., Armando Morales, A Study of Mexican American Perceptions of Law Enforcement Policies and Practices in East Los Angeles (June 1972) (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Southern California) (on file with author). For an illuminating account of how law enforcement and the criminal justice system employed thoroughly vague and manipulable vagrancy laws during the 1950s and 1960s, see RISA GOLUBOFF, VAGRANT NATION: POLICE POWER, CONSTITUTIONAL CHANGE, AND THE MAKING OF THE 1960S (2016). For a deeply knowledgeable depiction of how teachers and law enforcement officials—and, inevitably, others still—targeted Latinx and Black youth in Oakland by labeling and punishing them for being dangerous and difficult and criminal, all part of “the youth control complex,” see VICTOR M. RIOS, PUNISHED: POLICING THE LIVES OF BLACK AND LATINO BOYS (2011). 1550 66 UCLA L. REV. 1532 (2019)

friends sometimes crashed when something was not quite right at their own homes, a place where relatives and friends traveling up from Mexico would stay as they figured out, with my Dad and Mom’s help, how to get work permits, a place that was a safe house of sorts in the middle of targeted East LA, a safe house I was blessed to call my home.

2. Ages 5–8

 As I turned five, six, seven, eight years old, I came to realize what we lived with was not so easy to treat as normal, was not so easy to shrug off, was not at all easy to understand. I began to notice what had happened and was happening in East LA in ways that bewildered and infuriated me, and bewildered and infuriated me all the more as my parents directly answered the many questions I would ask about their experiences, the experiences of our friends and family members, and the experiences of our neighbors.  I began to see that far-flung, coordinated-enough networks of systems, institutions, and individuals targeted those of us who called East LA home. I am talking about targeting all of us—Mexicans and all the other folks living with us: African Americans, Armenians, Basques, Chinese, Filipinos, Italians, Irish, Japanese, Jews, Russians. (“If these Irish and Russian families are stupid enough to live in East LA,” one cop wisecracked to my parents, “they deserve to be treated like Mexicans.”) And I am talking about the educational system, the health care system, the criminal justice system, the electoral system. I am talking about the racial and cultural and class systems that shaped and reflected housing and labor and banking markets and public and private and civic relations.33 Was I already beginning to sense that in interactions with these networks, especially law enforcement officers, the color of your neighborhood matters almost as much as the color of your skin?34

33. In contemporary comparative constitutional literature, Scott Newton’s forceful depiction and assessment of the constitutional systems of post–Soviet Central Asian nations bring to mind, perhaps strangely, a variation on my early perceptions of the sprawling 1950s East LA networks that, without irony or inaccuracy, regarded themselves as living within the rule of law in a constitutional democracy. See SCOTT NEWTON, THE CONSTITUTIONAL SYSTEMS OF THE INDEPENDENT CENTRAL ASIAN STATES: A CONTEXTUAL ANALYSIS (2017). 34. For a sample of recent literature documenting and illuminating how the concentration of people of color (especially Latinos and Blacks) in a neighborhood relates directly to the nature of interactions (especially fatal interactions) between law enforcement officers and residents of those neighborhoods, see Odis Johnson Jr. et al., How Neighborhoods Growing Up in Authoritarian 1950s East LA 1551

 I began to see that targeting meant inaction as much as action. Networks of systems, institutions, and individuals knew both how to take action against and how to neglect the residents of East LA. They seemingly stalked our every move through law enforcement, truancy, and immigration practices, for example. And they apparently never cared about our lack of access to quality health care, K–12 public education, better-paying jobs, financial services, and other important means of everyday survival and social mobility.35  I began to appreciate that nobody on local television and radio stations ever said a word about how we were targeted. What is newsworthy about regarding and treating East LA residents as criminals? My Dad roared about how the local newspapers, especially the incredibly powerful Los Angeles Times, positively reinforced racist and xenophobic stereotypes. He and my Mom knew full well how the Chandler family newspaper had throughout its history favored the Anglo-Saxon ideal of Los Angeles and the United States, dominated city hall and the police department, aimed to destroy unions, and championed the targeting of East LA and every other community of color.36  I recall hazily, when I was five and six years old, how my Dad and Mom would emphasize the patterns they detected in the coverage offered by the Chandler family’s Los Angeles Times. In assiduously avoiding stories about mundane authoritarian practices and in commending in print the deportation of undocumented residents during , the Los Angeles Times owners, editors, and journalists proudly declared themselves a prominent part of the networks targeting us and perhaps the propaganda leader for white supremacist authoritarian practices across

Matter in Fatal Interactions Between Police and Men of Color, 220 SOC. SCI. & MED. 226 (2019). 35. Even with librarians’ superb help, I was unable to find literature discussing the particular failings along these many fronts—with the notable exception of health care. In the early twentieth century, the public health system in Los Angeles cared about the health of Mexicans and Filipinos, for example, only insofar as they did not want diseased exceptions contaminating the White population. See EMILY K. ABEL, TUBERCULOSIS AND THE POLITICS OF EXCLUSION: A HISTORY OF PUBLIC HEALTH AND MIGRATION TO LOS ANGELES (2007); Emily K. Abel, “Only the Best Class of Immigration”: Public Health Policy Toward Mexicans and Filipinos in Los Angeles, 1910–1940, 94 AM. J. PUB. HEALTH 932 (2004). For a parallel exploration of how scientific rhetoric and public health practices helped contribute to the particular racial categories, stories, and arguments embraced about Mexicans, Japanese, and Chinese in Los Angeles, see NATALIA MOLINA, FIT TO BE CITIZENS? PUBLIC HEALTH AND RACE IN LOS ANGELES, 1879–1939 (2006). 36. For the book many regard as the definitive account of the Times, see BILL BOYARSKY, INVENTING L.A.: THE CHANDLERS AND THEIR TIMES (2009). 1552 66 UCLA L. REV. 1532 (2019)

metropolitan LA. My Dad regularly read aloud what the Times did cover, including (as my Mom later reminded me) the 1954 coverage of Operation Wetback, featuring the Times’ routine use of the racist label “wetbacks,” a conscious and active choice signaling enthusiastic ratification of the social, moral, and legal judgments implicated in yet another repatriation campaign.37  I began to wonder, already, during these early years: Who really is worse? The out-and-out in-your-face racists? Or the many polished enablers— from both political parties—of racist authoritarian practices? In routinely reinforcing and normalizing our status as exceptions, our status as targets of these networks, don’t all enablers significantly benefit in the course of participating in and never actually challenging all we endured, precisely what they rarely, if ever, experienced? Mustn’t the bipartisan mainstream be judged at least as ugly and even more powerful than the most rabid racists?38

37. For a series revealing just how consciously and frequently the Los Angeles Times chose the term “wetback” to describe Mexicans and, in some instances, Mexican Americans in reporting the sweeps in Los Angeles and especially East Los Angeles, see Wetbacks’ Detention Camp Slated: Elysian Park Will Be Focal Point in Alien Roundup, L.A. TIMES 2 (June 12, 1954), http://documents.latimes.com/june-12-1954-wetbacks-detention- camp-slated [https://perma.cc/HJ86-D29S]; 500 Nabbed by L.A. Wetback Raiders: 200 Take Part in Dragnet, L.A. TIMES 1 (June 18, 1954), http://documents.latimes.com/june- 18-1954-500-nabbed [https://perma.cc/SAY8-XYMN]; 400 More Wetbacks Rounded Up, L.A. TIMES A1 (June 19, 1954), http://documents.latimes.com/june-19-1954-1259-more- deported [https://perma.cc/RQ5E-XVGB]; Bill Dredge, 1259 More Wetbacks Deported in Single Day, L.A. TIMES A1, (June 19, 1954), http://documents.latimes.com/june-19- 1954-1259-more-deported [https://perma.cc/LWU2-LW2N]; Bill Dredge, Wetbacks Herded at Nogales Camp, L.A. TIMES 1A (June 20, 1954), http://documents.latimes.com/ june-20-1954-herded-nogales-camp [https://perma.cc/L3G7-6NUL]; Roundup of Wetbacks in L.A. Still On, L.A. TIMES 1A (June 20, 1954), http://documents.latimes.com/ june-20-1954-herded-nogales-camp [https://perma.cc/L3G7-6NUL]; U.S. Patrol Halts Border ‘Invasion’: Operation Wetback Success Noted on First Anniversary, L.A. TIMES 26 (June 17, 1955) http://documents.latimes.com/june-17-1955-us-patrol-halts- border-invasion [https://perma.cc/25NF-7892]. Perhaps more revealing still, the Times took over two decades, until 1979, to begin changing its internal policies about the routine practice of using “wetback” in its stories. As Matt Ballinger, a journalist at the Times, reports, “[b]y 1979, the paper’s stylebook would caution that the word [“wetback”] was acceptable only in quotations. The 1995 edition added that even in quotes, the usage required the approval of a senior editor. Outside of specific, rare circumstances, such as references to the past, the newspaper would not use such language today.” Matt Ballinger, From the Archives: How the Times Covered Mass Deportations in the Eisenhower Era, L.A. TIMES (Nov. 13, 2015), http://documents.latimes.com/eisenhower-era-deportations [https://perma.cc/RWN6- VPAU]. 38. In believing this to be true, I obviously follow the lead of radical abolitionists of all authoritarian practices targeting exceptions. For an example of my own views Growing Up in Authoritarian 1950s East LA 1553

 I began to realize that what appeared as a natural part of everyday life reflected human bias in operation. These networks targeted us precisely because, within the rule of law, they could. They could declare us an exception—tacitly, informally, now and then in some official hearing or proceeding, and most especially through everyday practices. At the heart of the matter, long before the 1950s, the stocks of racist categories, stories, and arguments the United States drew upon and created defined Mexicans as criminals—as genetically and culturally inferior, as unworthy of fully equal citizenship, as a mixed-race mongrel breed that is dissolute, virulent, menacing, evil.39

elaborated, see Gerald P. López, How Mainstream Reformers Design Ambitious Reentry Programs Doomed to Fail and Destined to Reinforce Targeted Mass Incarceration and Social Control, 11 HASTINGS RACE & POVERTY L.J. 1 (2014) [hereinafter Reentry Programs]. For a famous abolitionist’s influential view, see Letter from Martin Luther King, Jr. to C.C.J. Carpenter, Bishop, Alabama Episcopal Diocese, Joseph A. Durick, Bishop, Roman Catholic Diocese of Nashville, Milton L. Grafman, Rabbi, Temple Emanu-El, Nolan B. Harmon, Bishop, The Methodist Church, George M. Murray, Reverend, Episcopal Diocese of Alabama, Edward V. Ramage, Reverend, Alabama Synod of the Presbyterian Church in the United States & Earl Stallings, Reverend, Birmingham First Baptist Church, Letter from Birmingham Jail (Apr. 16, 1963), http://okra.stanford.edu/transcription/document_images/undecided/630416-019.pdf [https://perma.cc/3TP3-W3RP]. 39. For only a sample of the larger literature capturing stocks of categories, stories, and arguments that, long before the 1950s, produced and reproduced Mexicans as criminal, deviant, and subhuman, see GLORIA ANZALDÚA, BORDERLANDS/LA FRONTERA: THE NEW MESTIZA (3d ed. 2007) (1987); ALBERT CAMARILLO, CHICANOS IN A CHANGING SOCIETY: FROM MEXICAN PUEBLOS TO AMERICAN BARRIOS IN SANTA BARBARA AND SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, 1848–1930 (1979); CHICANA LESBIANS: THE GIRLS OUR MOTHERS WARNED US ABOUT (Carla Trujillo ed., 1991); ARNOLDO DE LEÓN, THEY CALLED THEM GREASERS: ANGLO ATTITUDES TOWARD MEXICANS IN TEXAS, 1821–1900 (1983); ERNESTO GALARZA, MERCHANTS OF LABOR: THE MEXICAN BRACERO STORY (1964); LAURA E. GÓMEZ, MANIFEST DESTINIES: THE MAKING OF THE MEXICAN AMERICAN RACE (2007); RAMÓN A. GUTIÉRREZ, WHEN JESUS CAME, THE CORN MOTHERS WENT AWAY: MARRIAGE, SEXUALITY, AND POWER IN NEW MEXICO 1500–1846 (1991); ABRAHAM HOFFMAN, UNWANTED MEXICAN AMERICANS IN THE GREAT DEPRESSION: REPATRIATION PRESSURES, 1929–1939 (1974); MCWILLIAMS, NORTH FROM MEXICO, supra note 4; ALFREDO MIRANDÉ, (1987); DAVID MONTEJANO, ANGLOS AND MEXICANS IN THE MAKING OF TEXAS, 1836–1986 (1987). For some analyses of all Latinx populations in the United States, see BORDERLESS BORDERS: U.S. LATINOS, LATIN AMERICANS, AND THE PARADOX OF INTERDEPENDENCE (Frank Bonilla, Edwin Meléndez, Rebecca Morales & María de los Angeles Torres eds., 1998); BORICUAS: INFLUENTIAL PUERTO RICAN WRITINGS—AN ANTHOLOGY (Roberto Santiago ed., 1995); THE COLUMBIA HISTORY OF LATINOS IN THE UNITED STATES SINCE 1960 (David G. Gutiérrez ed., 2004); THE LATINO/A CONDITION: A CRITICAL READER (Richard Delgado & Jean Stefancic eds., 1998); LATINOS REMAKING AMERICA (Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco & Mariela M. Páez eds., 2002); PEDRO A. MALAVET, AMERICA’S COLONY: THE POLITICAL AND CULTURAL CONFLICT BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES AND PUERTO RICO (2004); ANA MENÉNDEZ, IN CUBA I WAS A GERMAN SHEPHERD (2001); CECILIA MENJÍVAR, FRAGMENTED TIES: SALVADORAN IMMIGRANT NETWORKS IN 1554 66 UCLA L. REV. 1532 (2019)

 I began to realize just how much my Dad and Mom missed Prescott and Jerome, the adjoining Arizona mining towns where their families settled after coming from Mexico and where they were raised. They missed the places where they married and celebrated with others, where in 1938 my Mom gave birth to their first child, my big brother, and where they never would have left were it not for the lasting repercussions of the Great Depression. They missed their friends and extended family. They missed the reality of knowing nearly everyone by face and many by name. They missed the beauty of living at 5000 feet. And they even seemed to miss the particular brand of racist authoritarian practices permeating these hardscrabble towns, if only because life had already taught them how to deal with those practices as opposed to all they had to learn from scratch in East LA. Racist authoritarianism apparently could be rabid and dangerous everywhere and yet, somehow, I sensed, even as a young boy, different to experience in different places.40  I began to realize, especially between five- and eight-years-old, that my big brother, ten years older, was in trouble. He was running in a street gang. He was a heroin addict. He was already ensnared within the criminal justice system. At the deepest level, though, he was lost, confused, hurt, sad. The adults paid to serve and protect young people mocked him for what he could not do, ordered him to do whatever they pleased, and then punished him severely for what they might not even notice (or perhaps even praise) had he looked different, had a different name, and lived in another part of town. He knew all these putridly ugly adults were wrong, but he was impossibly hard on himself. No matter how dreadful and dangerous the circumstances, he felt he had failed time and again, disappointing all who loved him, proving the assholes right. Nobody ever

AMERICA (2000); MIGUEL PIÑERO, LA BODEGA SOLD DREAMS (1980); RENATO ROSALDO, PRAYER TO SPIDER WOMAN/REZO A LA MUJER ARAÑA (2003); Juan F. Perea, Buscando América: Why Integration and Equal Protection Fail to Protect Latinos, 117 HARV. L. REV. 1420 (2004); Ediberto Román, Empire Forgotten: The United States’s Colonization of Puerto Rico, 42 VILL. L. REV. 1119 (1997). No one has done more than the gifted and dedicated Francisco Valdes to routinely pull together and organize diverse scholars to explore the dynamic complexity of Latinx and multiracial and multicultural communities. For a partial list of Valdes’s publications, see Francisco Valdes, U. MIAMI SCH. L., https://www.law.miami.edu/faculty/francisco-valdes [https://perma.cc/WH 9T- NCQT]. 40. A sizeable scholarly and popular literature addresses mining in the West—the industry, the towns themselves, and sometimes the race and gender dynamics. If you were reading just one book to get a feel for the many small Arizona mining towns and their race and gender and class relationships, a wise choice would be LINDA GORDON, THE GREAT ARIZONA ORPHAN ABDUCTION (1999). Growing Up in Authoritarian 1950s East LA 1555

punished my big brother as viciously as he punished himself. He took individual responsibility to an extreme you had to live with to believe.41  I began to realize that, as much as I adored my big brother, as much as I regarded him as one of my few heroes, I should never glamorize the pachuco life, certainly not as my brother and his friends led it. If like me any of you actually lived from your earliest years with a heroin addict and a gang member, shared a home with and spent time on the streets with him and his many friends and their many enemies, then you should know why I both loved him and admired him but could hardly regard heroin- addicted pachuco gang life as a desirable fantasy, much less a life anyone with real options should choose.42  Yet I began to realize more fully how much my brother and the teenage boys and girls he ran with, the and of that era, were making a statement through their dress, their affiliations, their behavior. Mouthing off and acting out were not just inexplicable wildness. They embodied direct ways of saying “hell, no—I do count, and I am equal.” Pachucos and pachucas tried with all their might, and without any conventional power, to hold accountable all those targeting them and the rest of us through authoritarian practices. Go ahead and call them reckless, if you will. Go ahead and call them all kinds of names, if you insist. But never dare arrogantly insist the many pachucos and pachucas I knew were

41. For perhaps the first consequential challenge to the assumption already deeply embedded in the 1950s criminal justice system that young people should shoulder all responsibility for the choices they made—an assumption that legitimated the routine of youth in low-income, of color, and immigrant communities, see RICHARD A. CLOWARD & LLOYD E. OHLIN, DELINQUENCY AND OPPORTUNITY: A THEORY OF DELINQUENT GANGS (1960). In a 1961 interview with the New York Post, Lloyd Ohlin offered this summation of the view he and Cloward advanced: In a democratic society such as ours, equal opportunity is expressed constantly. . . . The myth of log-cabin-to-president and city-street-to- bank-president is deeply ingrained in us. . . . The trouble comes with the break between aspirations and opportunities. When we lead people to aspire to higher and higher standards and then fail to produce opportunities for them to do so, they are left with a sense of having been denied and they often become delinquents. Margalit Fox, Lloyd E. Ohlin, Expert on Crime and Punishment, Is Dead at 90, N.Y. TIMES (Jan. 3, 2009) (statement of Lloyd Ohlin), https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/ us/04ohlin.html [https://perma.cc/QP7T-GXEP]. 42. Describing my parents’ and brother’s efforts to help him and his friends discover and pursue a more constructive path is a far more complicated matter altogether. Cf. Heather L. Scheuerman, Jesssica M. Grosholz & Sherod Thaxton, Reexamining the Link Between Parental Knowledge and Delinquency: Unpacking the Influence of Adolescents’ and Their Parents’ Perceptions, 40 DEVIANT BEHAVIOR 703 (2019). 1556 66 UCLA L. REV. 1532 (2019)

not challenging injustice, the sort only targets of authoritarianism can claim to have fully felt and coped with.43  I fully grasped that, at eight years old, my brother could not read or write or spell—not just because something was not wired right in his brain (years later he would be diagnosed with various severe processing disorders) but because the public schools in East LA had no interest in educating us. I remember distinctly how this thunderbolt struck. Immediately after I completed the second grade at the same elementary school my brother had attended a decade earlier, my Mom told me she was going to teach me to read and write and spell. Read, write, and spell? It had not even crossed my mind that, at eight years old, heading into the third grade, I could not read or write or spell. None of our teachers had ever mentioned reading, writing, spelling or when we would get around to learning them. At some tacit level, I must have assumed I was right on track, where I was supposed to be. And maybe I was—exactly on the horrific course my parents and my brother had already experienced.  I began to appreciate what kinds of teachers we needed. After finishing her eight-hour shift, making dinner, and cleaning up, my Mom would sit down with me each evening and teach me to read and write and spell. Somehow, with no formal training and only a mediocre Arizona mining town high school education, my Mom managed to coach me up to speed. At the end of two months, she said I was ready. I could spend the August evenings playing outside. I was thrilled to be free to run, jump, climb, throw, and catch. But from then on, I saw my brother’s educational past differently than I ever had before, and I saw the present educational plight of all us kids in East LA through a radically different set of eyes. I have since never stopped asking of every educational institution: What do we do in school?44  I began to realize how truly twisted it was for truant officers and sheriff deputies and schoolteachers and administrators to coordinate to pick up

43. Yes, for those of you wondering, I mean to declare Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz an ignorant and arrogant buffoon for proclaiming he understood pachucos and pachucas, Mexican Americans, Mexicans, or, for that matter, anybody other than those who shared his own thoroughly pampered life. See OCTAVIO PAZ, THE LABYRINTH OF SOLITUDE: LIFE AND THOUGHT IN MEXICO (Lysander Kemp trans., Grove Press 1961) (1950). 44. Legal education, no less than pre-K, K–12, and all undergraduate and graduate education, ought to be resolutely scrutinized and, if necessary, thoroughly transformed. For my own insistence on the need to transform legal education, see Gerald P. López, Transform—Don’t Just Tinker With—Legal Education, 23 CLINICAL L. REV. 471 (2017); Gerald P. López, Transform—Don’t Just Tinker With—Legal Education (Part II), 24 CLINICAL L. REV. 247 (2018). Growing Up in Authoritarian 1950s East LA 1557

and charge kids missing school in East LA and threaten parents with criminal charges too. Indeed, enforcing truancy law had, once again, according to the word on the street, been declared a formal priority in 1950.45 Our options were to attend schools that failed to educate us or get hurled into the criminal justice system. I remember thinking to myself, they really do not care about us at all, do they? Except maybe to prove they can control us in any and every way they choose, without having to pay account? After all, exceptions like Mexicans deserve nothing better. Right?  I began to realize immigration officials and patrol officers, with the help of sheriffs and cops and California Highway Patrol officers and teachers and merchants and others, felt even more present in our lives than they had before, sweeping workplaces, buses, neighborhoods, parks, and homes, picking up relatives, friends, neighbors, and coworkers, making everyone feel as if they too could be removed, even if citizens or with work permits, leaving relatives and coworkers and acquaintances worried sick about what happened to their father, mother, grandparent, cousin, niece, child— to so many who suddenly vanished. My parents, especially my Dad, explained much of what happened before, during, and after Operation Wetback, even the holding pen, the buses, the trains, and the planes—all part of what felt like daily military raids.46  I began to realize how routinely my parents repeated their warnings about being out and about—what is labeled today “the talk.”47 Back then, we did not give the conversations a name. But you know how it goes. They warned me that many people I would deal with would expect me to submit to their every command and to their every whipsawing sentiment. Of

45. For an illustration of the racial dynamics within and across the Los Angeles Unified School District, see, for example, L.A. CITY SCHOOL DISTRICT MINUTES, VOLUME 59 (1927). (“Communication from Elysian Terrace Improvement Association regarding the Palos Verdes School on Effie Street and attendance lines due to their belief that it is unfair to ask Caucasian children to attend a school predominated by Mexicans as ‘experience has shown it is almost impossible to Americanize those people.’ Committee of the Whole reported the Rules of the Board of Education on June 27, 1927.”). 46. For a clarifying account of the roughly ten-year campaign labeled “Operation Wetback,” see KELLY LYTLE HERNÁNDEZ, MIGRA!: A HISTORY OF THE U.S. BORDER PATROL (2010). 47. So pronounced is the need for a ritualized conversation within Latinx and Black communities that Justice Sotomayor featured “the talk” in her dissent in Utah v. Strieff, 136 S. Ct. 2056, 2070 (2016) (Sotomayor, J., dissenting) (“For generations, black and brown parents have given their children ‘the talk’—instructing them never to run down the street; always keep your hands where they can be seen; do not even think of talking back to a stranger—all out of fear of how an officer with a gun will react to them.” (citing JAMES BALDWIN, THE FIRE NEXT TIME (1963); TA-NEHISI COATES, BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME (2015); W.E.B. DU BOIS, THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK (1903))). 1558 66 UCLA L. REV. 1532 (2019)

course, my Dad and Mom named cops, immigration officials, truant officers, and teachers, but they also included nearly every other category of person I would deal with, including administrators, bosses, and coaches. Not everyone would insist on obedience, and the same person might at times demand servility and at other times tolerate waywardness.  I began to perceive that my Dad and Mom never insisted I utterly capitulate. They knew I often pressed adults for explanations, even perhaps presumed I could grill authority figures about what they insisted I do or believe. They apparently did not want to squash that drive in me, or feared their efforts to suppress might well backfire. In any event, they wanted me to know even asking good questions would often be regarded as defiant. And the person feeling defied could quickly turn vindictive. And if the vengeful person possessed the right sort of power, as most did (if only through networked connections), he could feed me to the criminal justice system. Did I really want to be a martyr?  I began to realize my big brother had for some while been giving me his own version of the conversations our parents were having with me.48 Only “the talk” with my brother included very little talking. Instead, starting at least as early as 1953, he taught me through example and through practice how to observe and listen. Every walk, every drive, and every experience of hanging out included tests: What did you see? What did you hear? What did you sense? If I missed something or misread a scene, my brother proved demandingly matter of fact: “On our left, you should have noticed . . . . Didn’t you hear what he didn’t say?” Especially he taught how vigilantly to monitor everyone surveilling and aiming to entrap us. He showed me how to map the patterns of law enforcement and truant officers and immigration patrol officers, of teachers and merchants. Most of all, he wanted me to learn how to avoid contact.  I began to appreciate that if avoidance proved impossible, my brother expected me to know what next to do. He taught me how, if the need arose, to run from cops on the beat. Literally, he would have me practice escaping—from the school yard, from Belvedere and Laguna Parks, from commercial areas like Whitter Boulevard, Atlantic Boulevard, and First Street, from industrial areas a block away, on the south side of Union Pacific. He showed me special getaway routes and special places to hide

48. As I write this, I find myself wondering which patterns my brother would have enthusiastically endorsed and vehemently denounced in Alice Goffman’s chapter “The Art of Running,” describing one Black neighborhood in Philadelphia. See Goffman, supra note 17, at 23–53. Growing Up in Authoritarian 1950s East LA 1559

and identified special people to trust if I had to take flight. And he taught me how, if the need arose, to defend myself against cops or any other adult who might corner me. Literally, he would have me practice street-fighting combinations to stun or stagger the attacker and then run like crazy, using the escape routes I had internalized. The practices often centered on no- holds-barred sparring.  I began to consciously appreciate that many people did not have a Mom and Dad—or anybody—who made their children feel totally safe, totally loved, totally like they could do absolutely whatever they wanted to do in the world. My parents somehow did all that even when money was scarce and the roof was leaking and the plumbing backing up, even while having relatives and friends and vatos my brother ran with staying with us for days and weeks and months, finding tentative yet real security in a safe house of sorts in the middle of targeted East LA, in a house I was blessed to call my home.  And yet I began to consciously appreciate that even parents like mine could offer no assurance to themselves or anybody else that things would go well for their kids and all the other kids in our neighborhoods. Luck, more than anything, would shape our futures, within my family and across all of East LA. And, no, you cannot always make your own luck.

3. Ages 9, 10 . . .

 As I turned nine, ten years old, I came to realize just how utterly complex everything we experienced turned out to be, in ways that exposed and disproved simplistic stories we often heard and even told one another, whether about those of us who lived in East LA, those who turned out to be part of the networks targeting us, those of us who celebrated the rule of law in a constitutional democracy, those of us who denounced blind allegiance to a rule of law that, at its core and through all its extensions, could prove as inclined to sabotage accountability as to regard accountability as at the heart of life in the United States, those of us who wanted, in one way or another, to liberate ourselves and others from authoritarian practices.49

49. As I was writing this article, I learned Günter Frankenberg was coediting a volume on authoritarian constitutionalism. With characteristic generosity, the wonderfully gifted Frankenberg sent me various chapters, all of which were valuable in elaborating my account of 1950s East LA. See, e.g., Günter Frankenberg, Authoritarian Constitutionalism: Coming to Terms With Modernity’s Nightmares, in AUTHORITARIAN CONSTITUTIONALISM 1 (Helena Alviar García & Günter Frankenberg eds., 2019); Helena 1560 66 UCLA L. REV. 1532 (2019)

 I began to come face to face with just how deeply contradictory ideas and feelings about Mexicans were. As I began to travel regularly in greater metropolitan Los Angeles for various competitions, I came into contact with larger numbers of every group inhabiting Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, and Riverside Counties. Especially while dealing with Whites, I could feel the stares and the odd combination of superiority and fear in those staring. In sports and music tournaments, my buddies and I just did what we did—sometimes winning quite a bit and, of course, losing some. But I learned the most in those competitions somehow linked to intelligence in people’s meritocratic fantasies (science fairs, math marathons, spelling bees, speech contests). Whenever we won, and we frequently did, the White kids and their teachers and parents and fans looked stupefied.  I began to realize I could not really get why they appeared so befuddled. I never for a moment bought that Mexicans, or any other exceptions, were in any way inferior. And, in any competition, I expected us to win. Why didn’t these White kids and their families and teachers and fans know what was coming in competing against us? But in these many and diverse competitions across Southern California, I came to grasp more explicitly just how much Whites appeared to need constant affirmation that Mexicans, Africans Americans, Japanese, Chinese, Filipinos, Native Americans really were exceptions, dangerous subhumans, utterly inferior, pathological, criminals.50  I began to realize just how much contrary evidence about exceptions floored all these White kids, their families, their teachers, and their fans. The excuse-making and twisted rationalizations they verbalized after losing to us were something to behold. It was as if they had been betrayed by their own ideology. Panic set in. I could feel it. And I felt badly about how trapped they were by feeling, at once, so superior and so frightened. They did not appear to even consider any other option for understanding who we were, who they were, and how we might fit together. They could not all have felt the same way, right? I knew they did not. Yet they always looked unified.

Alviar García, Neoliberalism as a Form of Authoritarian Constitutionalism, in AUTHORITARIAN CONSTITUTIONALISM, supra, at 37. 50. Of these various nasty labels, the one perhaps least examined is “pathological.” For my own elaboration of how the term became used to describe Mexicans and Puerto Ricans, and then later Blacks, and how pathological it is to use the term the way social scientists and a great many others do, see Gerald P. López, I’ll Tell You What’s Pathological (Stanford Ctr. for Chicano Research, Working Paper No. 39, 1992). Growing Up in Authoritarian 1950s East LA 1561

 I began to see that networks of systems, institutions, and individuals that targeted those of us who called East LA home proved even more far reaching than the extensive ones I had already mentally recorded. I started to appreciate the prominent role of the Catholic Church and, in particular, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. I have no idea why this conscious awareness took so long. Already at a young age, with my parents help, I knew Pope Pius XII and Cardinal McIntyre saw “Commies” in every nook and cranny and looked down upon every other religion (and, of course, condemned agnostics and atheists). I regarded all that hate as part of the ugly stupidities pervading the dogma we found in our little portable catechism and in the Catholic newspaper. And I said as much in heated exchanges with priests, nuns, and dutiful parishioners. I made certain, as the conversations grew ever more blistering, to ask them all about the racist slurs uttered by other Catholics and about stories describing McIntyre’s cozy relationship with the John Birch Society.51  I began to realize, though, what finally for me defined the Archdiocese of Los Angeles as part of—indeed, pivotal to—the networks targeting East LA residents. The Archdiocese of Los Angeles, McIntyre, and all his obsequious minions regarded the very same people they sought to convert to and remain tithing members of the Catholic Church as incapable of governing ourselves. Had they ever met my Mom and Dad? Our neighbors? The other residents of East LA? It quickly dawned on me: Getting to know those who lived in East LA would not matter one bit. The Catholic Church, like so many others within the complex networks, had long regarded us as an exception. Through millennia-old customary practices, the archdiocese did what it pleased with us, never expecting to face open opposition, doing almost everything imaginable to sabotage accountability.  I began to appreciate, especially with my Dad’s help, the Catholic Church embodied an authoritarianism that had its own very long history, fortifying the practices of others in networks targeting East LA, indeed making McIntyre and the Archdiocese of Los Angeles central to

51. My parents, one a practicing Catholic and the other an enemy of the Catholic Church, learned Cardinal McIntyre regularly sent diocesan priests to John Birch Society meetings. While I have had difficulty finding literature on the relationship between the Catholic Church and the John Birch Society, one website offers an account that parallels what we understood to be true. See Donald R. McClarey, James Cardinal McIntyre and the Conclave of 1963, AM. CATHOLIC (Mar. 13, 2013), https://www.the-american- catholic.com/2013/03/13/james-cardinal-mcintyre-and-the-conclave-of-1963 [https://perma.cc/F3ZM-WFK4]. 1562 66 UCLA L. REV. 1532 (2019)

formidable surveillance and control. The church demanded absolute obedience. At least in major matters, the pope was infallible and, across all fronts, the bishops and priests must swear unconditional allegiance to the pope. Like the Vatican itself, McIntyre aimed to crush all dissent and deny all accountability.52 Subjecting exceptions to authoritarian practices was as utterly familiar to the Catholic Church as the pompous regal splendor of McIntyre’s garb and the routine subordination of all women, not least nuns and female parishioners. Little wonder my Dad loathed the Catholic Church and my Mom proved herself the most independent-minded devout Catholic I have ever met.53  I began realizing that a day, a week, a month, a year of encounters with those within the networks aiming to surveil and control East LA’s residents yielded varied interactions. We could sometimes sense the networks targeting us did not reflect superb synchronization, much less perfect execution of orders from on high. Indeed, the networks often felt disorganized. They extended their reach, yet weakened their grasp, through sometimes tenuous understandings and relationships. The most autocratic and tyrannical within the networks must have felt great frustration—or at least so I hoped.  I started more deeply appreciating that what could appear to be failure to coordinate and implement the networks targeting us might well reflect,

52. Even with the help of UCLA’s wonderful librarians, I was unable to find literature documenting these years, especially McIntyre’s reign. In the 1960s, one notably brave young priest, William H. DuBay, explicitly challenged McIntyre’s failure to support the modern civil rights movement, cabling Pope Paul VI to remove McIntyre for intimidating Catholic activists. For DuBay’s own account of these years and this encounter, see WILLIAM H. DUBAY, THE PRIEST AND THE CARDINAL: RACE AND REBELLION IN 1960S LOS ANGELES (2016). To get a glimpse of what DuBay did with his life following this encounter, see Raymond A. Schroth, Renegade Priest in 1960s Los Angeles: What Ever Happened to William DuBay?, AM. MAG. (Sep. 29, 2016), https://www.america magazine.org/content/all-things/what-ever-happened-father-william-dubay [https:// perma.cc/UKT8-3G8H]. 53. In part to honor my Mom and Dad, in part to continue to explore the feeling and idea of faith, I continue to read theology of various sorts, including the work of radical Catholics, whose views in part my parents anticipated in their everyday conversations with one another, with certain friends, and with me. See, e.g., HANS KÜNG, THE CATHOLIC CHURCH: A SHORT HISTORY (John Bowden trans., 2001); HANS KÜNG, INFALLIBLE?: AN UNRESOLVED ENQUIRY (1994); HANS KÜNG, WHY I AM STILL A CHRISTIAN (E.C. Hughes trans., Continuum Int’l Publ’g Grp. 2005) (1987). Carl Schmitt would regard the Catholic Church’s pivotal role in the authoritarian networks governing 1950s East LA as utterly natural and predictable. See CARL SCHMITT, THE CONCEPT OF THE POLITICAL 42 (George Schwab trans., Univ. of Chi. Press expanded ed. 1996) (1932) (“The juridic formulas of the omnipotence of the state are, in fact, only superficial secularizations of the theological formulas of the omnipotence of God.”). Growing Up in Authoritarian 1950s East LA 1563

instead, the conscious choices of those aiming to disrupt authoritarianism and, instead, to practice robust accountability. It was not just by chance we would run into some individuals who defied the very authoritarian practices they had been charged to carry out. Some nuns, priests, teachers, nurses, merchants, bosses, coaches, professionals, and industrialists treated us as fully equal—even more to the point, regarded us as entitled to hold them accountable in their exercise of power. Some did so openly, some cautiously, some through blends of behavior. (Bless them all.)  I began to realize that, whether through the failures of design and implementation by those who would sabotage accountability or the courageous work of those who aimed against the odds to sabotage authoritarianism, we could spot openings in the networked practices. And we would share these gateways with one another. A boss who was a stand- up guy. A teacher who actually thought and behaved as if residents of East LA deserved great instruction. A savings and loan officer, a merchant, a health provider, a court administrator who, if only inadvertently, provided services to us as they would to, say, McIntyre had he ever lived in our neighborhood. These gaps in the networks often offered us the opportunities we needed to escape some strangleholds and to carry on with a version of the life we desired for ourselves and our neighbors.  Even while sensing that authoritarianism and accountability are each as thoroughly fragmented and internally contradictory as the very rule of law within which they offer polar alternatives,54 I knew “weak ties” still could bind together networks.55 Contrasting encounters could not ultimately disguise that seemingly everyone within the far-flung networks could target us if they chose to. They might not always exercise their power, but they never worried if they did. Even when disorganized and fitful, networked individuals could do almost as much as they pleased. They knew, in advance, others would back them, and they knew, after the fact, others would immunize them. The practices of authoritarianism permeating East LA could be all over the place—at once everywhere and

54. For an article that compellingly describes such a view, see Duncan Kennedy, Authoritarian Constitutionalism in Liberal Democracies, in AUTHORITARIAN CONSTITUTIONALISM, supra note 49, at 161. 55. Of course, the reference finds its origins in Mark S. Granovetter, The Strength of Weak Ties, 78 AM. J. SOC. 1360 (1973). For a fascinating view of the perhaps peculiar networks in operation in post-Soviet political systems, see HENRY E. HALE, PATRONAL POLITICS: EURASIAN REGIME DYNAMICS IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE (2015). 1564 66 UCLA L. REV. 1532 (2019)

messy. Yet these practices took their toll, inflicted their damage, on all of us.56  I began to sense half-consciously, through the authoritarian practices we experienced, that virtually everyone routinely made crucial decisions. In the name of exercising discretion, cops on the beat and immigration officials and truant officers, and teachers and priests and real estate agents and loan officers and nurses and census takers, on a daily and even moment-to-moment basis exercised massive, nearly unaccountable power. They were “sovereigns on the street”—more menacing, really, than the most authoritarian president or pope. Or at least it felt that way. Certainly, we learned we had no predictably effective method to question and reverse judgments they made.  I began to appreciate, however, that these sovereigns on the street did not explain some horrors. As my parents had taught me, particularly my Dad through the articles and books he demanded I consume, presidents

56. For such reasons, some scholars used colonialism as a way of understanding Latinx communities within the United States. For a helpful intellectual history of this period, see Ramón A. Gutiérrez, Internal Colonialism: An American Theory of Race, 1 DU BOIS REV. 281 (2004). Growing Up in Authoritarian 1950s East LA 1565

ordered the Palmer Raids,57 the repatriation of Mexicans,58 the internment of Japanese,59 and Operation Wetback.60 And in these horrific episodes, all

57. For accounts of the Palmer Raids from various perspectives, see CHRISTOPHER M. FINAN, FROM THE PALMER RAIDS TO THE PATRIOT ACT: A HISTORY OF THE FIGHT FOR FREE SPEECH IN AMERICA (2007); ALEX GOODALL, LOYALTY AND LIBERTY: AMERICAN COUNTERSUBVERSION FROM WORLD WAR I TO THE MCCARTHY ERA (2013); EDWIN P. HOYT, THE PALMER RAIDS, 1919–1920: AN ATTEMPT TO SUPPRESS DISSENT (1969); DANIEL KANSTROOM, DEPORTATION NATION: OUTSIDERS IN AMERICAN HISTORY (2007); LABOR RESEARCH ASS’N, THE PALMER RAIDS (Robert W. Dunn ed., 1948), https://archive.org/details/ThePalmerRaids; CHARLES H. MCCORMICK, SEEING REDS: FEDERAL SURVEILLANCE OF RADICALS IN THE PITTSBURGH MILL DISTRICT, 1917–1921 (1997); ROBERT K. MURRAY, RED SCARE: A STUDY IN NATIONAL HYSTERIA, 1919–1920 (1955); LOUIS F. POST, THE DEPORTATIONS DELIRIUM OF NINETEEN-TWENTY: A PERSONAL NARRATIVE OF AN HISTORIC OFFICIAL EXPERIENCE (Da Capo Press reprt. ed. 1970) (1923); WILLIAM PRESTON, JR., ALIENS AND DISSENTERS: FEDERAL SUPPRESSION OF RADICALS, 1903– 1933 (1963); REGIN SCHMIDT, RED SCARE: FBI AND THE ORIGINS OF ANTICOMMUNISM IN THE UNITED STATES, 1919–1943 (2000); NICK SHEPLEY, THE PALMER RAIDS AND THE RED SCARE: 1918–1920 (2011); David Cole, The New McCarthyism: Repeating History in the War on Terrorism, 38 HARV. C.R.-C.L. L. REV. 1 (2003); Ann Fagan Ginger, Learning the Trade in the Palmer Raids, 39 GUILD PRAC. 65 (1982); Sonia Kaross, The Palmer Raids: The Deportation Mania Begins, in Bud Schultz & Ruth Schultz, IT DID HAPPEN HERE: RECOLLECTIONS OF POLITICAL REPRESSION IN AMERICA 160 (1989); Suzanne Orr, Palmer Raids, in MULTICULTURAL AMERICA: A MULTIMEDIA ENCYCLOPEDIA 1672 (Carlos E. Cortés ed., 2013); Robert D. Warth, The Palmer Raids, 48 S. ATLANTIC Q. 1 (1949); Harlan Grant Cohen, Note, The (Un)favorable Judgment of History: Deportation Hearings, the Palmer Raids, and the Meaning of History, 78 N.Y.U. L. REV. 1431 (2003); Andrew Cornell, “For a World Without Oppressors:” U.S. Anarchism from the Palmer Raids to the Sixties (Jan. 2011) (unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, New York University) (on file with author); Julian F. Jaffe, The Anti-Radical Crusade in New York: 1914–1924 (Feb. 1971) (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, New York University) (on file with author); Todd J. Pfannestiel, Rethinking the Red Scare (2001) (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, College of William and Mary) (on file with author). 58. For some accounts of the repatriation campaigns, see HOFFMAN, UNWANTED MEXICAN AMERICANS IN THE GREAT DEPRESSION: REPATRIATION PRESSURES, 1929–1939 (1974); Carey McWilliams, Getting Rid of the Mexican, 28 AM. MERCURY 322 (1933). Local agencies . . . used a variety of methods to rid themselves of “Mexicans”: persuasion, coaxing, incentive, and unauthorized coercion. . . . [T]he withholding or stoppage of relief payments and welfare services was used effectively when necessary[,] and people were often rounded up by local agencies to fill carloads of human cargo. . . . [L]ittle if any time was spent on determining whether the methods infringed upon the rights of citizens. LEO GREBLER ET AL., MEXICAN-AM. STUDY PROJECT, ADVANCE REPORT NO. 2, MEXICAN IMMIGRATION TO THE UNITED STATES: THE RECORD AND ITS IMPLICATIONS 26 (1966), https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED015798.pdf [https://perma.cc/TG5C-VZRS]. 59. For among the best examinations of Japanese American internment, see IMPOUNDED: DOROTHEA LANGE AND THE CENSORED IMAGES OF JAPANESE AMERICAN INTERNMENT (Linda Gordon and Gary Y. Okihiro eds., 2008); MARIUS B. JANSEN, THE MAKING OF MODERN JAPAN (2000); ERIC K. YAMAMOTO, MARGARET CHON, CAROL L. IZUMI, JERRY KANG & FRANK H. WU, RACE, RIGHTS AND REPARATION: LAW AND THE JAPANESE AMERICAN INTERNMENT (2001). 1566 66 UCLA L. REV. 1532 (2019)

of which indirectly and directly affected almost everyone who lived in East LA, the people at the bottom of the hierarchy and the people at far reaches of the networks carried out the orders of the men at the top. Maybe that was why the newspapers, the radio, and the television talked so much about the president and almost not at all about sovereigns on the street.  I began to sense, if only inchoately, that something was downright inaccurate—too simplistic—about the singleminded focus on the man at the top. After all, we in East LA knew better. Piss off a deputy sheriff, who then makes up reasons to arrest you, and suddenly a prosecutor is filing trumped-up charges, landing you in juvenile hall, the county jail, state prison. In each instance, those decisions do not have the sweep of the president’s calls. But if you added up all the decisions made by sovereigns on the street, is it at all obvious they didn’t affect even larger numbers, heaven forbid, than the Palmer Raids, repatriation, internment, and Operation Wetback?  I began to intuit that our way of thinking about all this, or at least the ways people talked about it all, did not hang together. It does not have to be just the man at the top, and it does not have to be just sovereigns on the street. In the United States, we residents of East LA had come to know everyone is a sovereign. And, in the right circumstances, practices carried out by those lowest and furthest out within networks—without the man at the top issuing an express edict—can have the same authoritarian effects generated by an order issued by the president and then executed by those at the bottom of the hierarchy and the far reaches of networks. Targeting exceptions through unaccountable practices can and does come from varying sources and in mutating forms.61  I began to realize just how much those within networks used diverse legal systems and diverse categories of law (criminal, immigration, education, health, financial) as suited them. It was not simply that the boundaries

60. For a valuable description of Operation Wetback, see Kelly Lytle Hernández, The and Consequences of Illegal Immigration: A Cross-Border Examination of Operation Wetback, 1943 to 1954, 37 W. HIST. Q. 421 (2006). For an earlier insightful contribution, see JOHN MCBRIDE, VANISHING BRACERO: VALLEY REVOLUTION (1963). 61. Comparativists have produced literatures about diverse authoritarian regimes with revealing common patterns and inevitably illuminating particularities. For only several examples, see BEYOND OCCUPATION: APARTHEID, COLONIALISM AND INTERNATIONAL LAW IN THE OCCUPIED PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES (Virginia Tilley ed., 2012); ALFRED W. MCCOY, POLICING AMERICA’S EMPIRE: THE UNITED STATES, THE PHILIPPINES, AND THE RISE OF THE SURVEILLANCE STATE (2009); Noémi Lévy-Aksu, An Ottoman Variation on the State of Siege: The Invention of the Idare-I Örfiyye during the First Constitutional Period, 55 NEW PERSP. ON TURK. 5 (2016). Growing Up in Authoritarian 1950s East LA 1567

between systems and categories of law blurred, though they did. It was not just that immigration became criminalization and criminalization became immigration, though they did in practice if not formally in principle. It was not just that teachers and truant officers worked with parole and probation and public housing officials. It was not just that systems and categories governing the labor and public health and financial markets all became blurred now and then in ways difficult to map.62  I began to realize, in ever-appreciative ways, that those within the governing networks used this or that law—or their self-serving interpretation of this or that law—to do as they pleased. More than sixty years before the term “ad hoc instrumentalism” was introduced, the networks’ practices already thoroughly reflected “a particular way of thinking about law and legal institutions, a way of thinking marked both by skepticism of formal legal categories and by skepticism of the idea that official discretion needs to be, and can be, cabined and controlled.”63  I began, in a very boyish way, to appreciate something deeper still tied together what we were experiencing. Sovereigns and sovereigns on the

62. To date, legal scholars have focused far more extensively on the relationship between the criminal and immigration systems than on the relationships between criminal justice and other systems. Since the late 1980s, Kathy Brady of the Immigrant Legal Resource Center has led the effort to identify, to challenge, and to educate others about what, decades later, people began calling “crimmigration.” See, e.g., Jennifer M. Chacón, A Diversion of Attention? Immigration Courts and the Adjudication of Fourth and Fifth Amendment Rights, 59 DUKE L.J. 1563 (2010); Jennifer M. Chacón, Managing Migration Through Crime, 109 COLUM. L. REV. SIDEBAR 135 (2009); Jennifer M. Chacón, Unsecured Borders: Immigration Restriction, Crime Control and National Security, 39 CONN. L. REV. 1827 (2007); Jennifer M. Chacón, Whose Community Shield?: Examining the Removal of the “Criminal Street Gang Member”, U. CHI. LEGAL F. 317 (2007); Ingrid V. Eagly, Local Immigration Prosecution: A Study of Arizona Before SB 1070, 58 UCLA L. REV. 1749 (2011); Ingrid V. Eagly, Prosecuting Immigration, 104 NW. U. L. REV. 1281 (2010); Maria Isabel Medina, The Criminalization of Immigration Law: Employer Sanctions and Marriage Fraud, 5 GEO. MASON L. REV. 669 (1997); Juliet Stumpf, The Crimmigration Crisis: Immigrants, Crime, and Sovereign Power, 56 AM. U. L. REV. 367 (2006); Juliet P. Stumpf, States of Confusion: The Rise of State and Local Power Over Immigration, 86 N.C. L. REV. 1557 (2008); Yolanda Vázquez, Perpetuating the Marginalization of Latinos: A Collateral Consequence of the Incorporation of Immigration Law into the Criminal Justice System, 54 HOW. L.J. 639 (2011). For legal scholarship that does examine, with great breadth and depth, the relationship between the criminal justice system, labor markets, and the stocks of labels we use to describe one another, see the work of Noah Zatz. See e.g., Noah D. Zatz, A New Peonage?: Pay, Work, or Go To Jail in Contemporary Child Support Enforcement and Beyond, 39 SEATTLE L. REV. 927 (2016); Noah D. Zatz, Poverty Unmodified?: Critical Reflections on the Deserving/Undeserving Distinction, 50 UCLA L. REV. 550 (2012). 63. David Alan Sklansky, Crime, Immigration, and Ad Hoc Instrumentalism, 15 NEW CRIM. L. REV 157, 197 (2012). 1568 66 UCLA L. REV. 1532 (2019)

street—everyone within the governing network—used this or that law, this or that institution, to do as they pleased precisely because they could. Of course, they could because they exercised so much raw power over us. I started to sense, however, that raw power shrouded the flexible mechanisms I routinely witnessed and took advantage of myself in challenging, say, Catholic dogma. What was it about law (church law, secular law, any body of informal and formal law)—what was it about how we made meaning at every moment—that permitted me to formulate heretical positions intelligible enough at least to irk my superiors, to make them believe they had to respond, even sometimes to force them unwillingly into debate?64  I began very fuzzily to sense that sovereigns of every sort could do as they pleased because law itself—or, more accurately, the way we do law—means we can claim, legitimately and without pretense, that contradictory decisions and courses of action can be legally justified.65 The rule of law makes room for and validates authoritarian practices every bit as fervently as it accommodates and warrants accountability practices—and, for that matter, every point in between these two poles of that spectrum. All those people we would hear extolling the rule of law as the unrivaled champion of accountability and the archenemy of authoritarianism either did not understand how law works, were living in denial, or were lying to everyone else who would buy their marketing pitch. To my youthful senses, it often felt as if all this was going on at once. Signaling may be as central to symbolically legitimating the misleading definition of the rule of law as it is to defining job markets.66 I already knew that even if we do law through contradictory choices that, in particular roles and circumstances, we can

64. My early and largely instrumental curiosity led, over time, to related views, including that all lawyering is problem solving, and professional lawyering (and all expertise) is a highly stylized variation on what everyday humans do each day in framing and addressing problems, and that stocks of categories, stories, and arguments equip us instantaneously as well as over time to create meaning for ourselves and to permit us to try to persuade others of some desired understanding of a situation. For elaborated accounts of some of my views, see REBELLIOUS LAWYERING, supra note 6; Reentry Programs, supra note 38. For my first effort to describe the human problem solving at the heart of all lawyering, see Gerald P. López, Lay Lawyering, 32 UCLA L. REV. 1. (1984) [hereinafter Lay Lawyering]. 65. For some within the legal world, broadly defined, who have made important contributions to overlapping views of this sort, all helping me to understand better what I did far more intuitively as a boy and in the heat of action, see Undocumented Mexican Migration, supra note 12. 66. See, e.g., Alex L. Wang, Symbolic Legitimacy and Chinese Environmental Reform, 48 ENVTL. L. 699 (2018); Michael Spence, Job Market Signaling, 87 Q. J. ECON. 355 (1973). Growing Up in Authoritarian 1950s East LA 1569

feel as shackled as liberated. Even if in debates with nuns and priests I dutifully followed the acceptable conventions for staking out and defending a position, almost everyone would sometimes look at me as if I were speaking gibberish. As soon as I saw their confounded gaze, I knew I had traveled too far outside mainstream Catholicism, a powerful ideology, even if tough to define with precision.67 Some sovereigns in the network might experience something like the mix of constraint and freedom I routinely experienced as a boy battling over how to define what Christ did and said.68 But many other sovereigns on the street certainly appeared to feel uninhibited in choosing whatever alternative they felt like imposing on us, particularly when no one reviewed their discretion. Within the rule of law, some really do feel free to do with exceptions as they please.  I began thinking to myself, in some undeveloped way, why wouldn’t those within the networks use systems and categories of law as they please? If they regard us as subhuman, threateningly dangerous and dangerously threatening criminals, why wouldn’t they control us by any means necessary? We knew this was no game. And though networked officials often behaved with scornful mocking humor, they were deadly serious. Surveil us, stop us for absolutely no reason other than we lived in East LA, then decide what they might want to pin on us and do with us, all through the choices—and often the falsehoods—unaccountable discretion invites and encourages and rewards. Severely constraining discretion can present its own problems, I know. But never speak glowingly of very broad and effectively unaccountable discretion without first having lived in a place like 1950s East LA.69

67. In much of my earlier work, I have tried to portray the power of mainstream ideology on the intelligibility, credibility, and persuasiveness of all problem solving, including lawyering. For an important description of how ideology can and does function as an often-unappreciated constraint, see, for example, REBELLIOUS LAWYERING, supra note 6; Lay Lawyering, supra note 64; J.M. Balkin, Ideology as Constraint, 43 STAN. L. REV. 1133 (1991) (book review). 68. For the most potently illuminating portrayal of freedom and constraint as experienced by a fictional federal district court judge trying to close the gap between what the law ostensibly requires and how he would like to come out, see Duncan Kennedy, Freedom and Constraint in Adjudication: A Critical Phenomenology, 36 J. LEGAL EDUC. 518 (1986). 69. For a formidably persuasive analysis of prosecutorial discretion in capital charging, see Sherod Thaxton, Disentangling Disparity: Exploring Racially Disparate Effect and Treatment in Capital Charging, 45 AM. J. CRIM. L. 95 (2018). William Stuntz’s depiction of the pathologies of radically expanded prosecutorial discretion—and their role in the further degradation of the U.S. criminal justice system—remains, like Thaxton’s work, mandatory reading. See STUNTZ, supra note 1. 1570 66 UCLA L. REV. 1532 (2019)

 I began to appreciate what felt downright real, if completely discombobulating. Of course, I felt like we were the good guys and all those targeting us were the bad guys. I was willing to fight with all the courage and cunning I could muster to join my parents, neighbors, and friends in challenging what we were enduring. Yet I realized our enemies in and around East LA (and across the Southwest and other parts of the nation and in other nations too) believed that they were the good guys and we were the bad guys. From their point of view, the authoritarian practices they imposed on us through their far-flung networks illustrated exactly what the good guys could do and should do when confronted with threateningly dangerous and dangerously threatening people in their midst. In their minds, they had to surveil and control us.70 From our point of view, at least those of us residents who continued to regard ourselves as the good guys, everything was wrong with how the rule of law thoroughly put into action the desires of our enemies.  I started to focus on what I could partly perceive yet not actually understand. The rule of law, like the rest of life, was about fights most often between people who regarded themselves as the good guys and the others as the bad guys. Any resolution to these fights seemed anything but permanent. That’s the message I took from my parents and brother and all those who fought the networked authoritarian practices targeting the residents of East LA. Resolutions, instead, felt like truces—challengeable truces, maybe even breakable truces, like those between gangs in our neighborhoods. The losers, still thinking themselves the good guys, would mobilize to change the background social understanding and lie in wait to challenge again the bad guys wrongly regarded by the rule of law as the good guys.71 Wouldn’t that just continue cyclically over time, all comfortably through and within the rule of law? Weren’t we in 1950s East LA just another instance of the regime dynamics happening in many places governed by the United States? I began to realize that what we were living through in 1950s East LA was not in any way new. Indeed, everyone

70. This remains, I believe, Schmitt’s most potent insight, and for me it is as much about life as about the rule of law in political democracies. See SCHMITT, supra note 7. 71. In legal scholarship, Siegel and Balkin nicely describe the phenomena. See Jack M. Balkin & Reva B. Siegel, Principles, Practices, and Social Movements, 154 U. PA. L. REV. 927 (2006). Of course, for people of color like the residents of 1950s East LA, the change in background social understanding may simply be the equivalent of those times when White interests happen to converge, however temporarily, with the interests of people of color. Cf. Derrick A. Bell, Jr., Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma, 93 HARV. L. REV. 518 (1980). Growing Up in Authoritarian 1950s East LA 1571

within the networks put into action so naturally the authoritarian practices targeting us that I appreciated, at some half-conscious level, this way of regarding and treating exceptions was likely ancient and venerable. It was part of our “cultural software”—long before the term software was introduced and long before cultural software was employed as a way of defining and illuminating ideology.72 Was it as old as the Catholic Church? Was it even older still, to be found in diverse communities, in varied forms, cultural variations on a common theme? Was it to be found every time a group of people saw themselves as a superpower or a colonizer? Did it begin whenever clusters of people exercising disproportionate power decided Mexicans were in their midst? Less than fully human, mongrel Mexican criminals? A people to treat however they pleased, damning accountability as immoral, impractical, and nearly illegal?  I began to realize how varied were the responses of those of us living in East LA, especially Mexicans and Mexican Americans, and more especially adult Mexicans and Mexican Americans. I should not have been surprised. The residents of East LA should no more think and feel the same about authoritarianism than, say, should the Chinese and Russians.73 Anyway, most of the people we knew despised the endless surveillance, the routine rousting, the collaboration within networks, the blurring and mixing and matching between systems and categories of law, the extraordinary and extraordinarily unaccountable power exercised by everyday folks putting authoritarian practices into play.  I began to perceive how others, though, seemed to regard our life in East LA as less just than it should be but perhaps understandably so. Of course, those with authority sometimes ran roughshod over us, these residents acknowledged. And no one held them to account. But perhaps, they said, these practices were to be understood as the actions of some bad apples. And even if the structure and culture of the ruling networks needed changing, perhaps some minor corrections would end up being all we needed. Stability is hard to achieve, they insisted. We should expect excesses in the efforts to provide the order East LA needed to function, they

72. For an account of ideology as cultural software, see J.M. BALKIN, CULTURAL SOFTWARE: A THEORY OF IDEOLOGY (1998). 73. For a sense of the diverse reactions within populations to various forms and practices of authoritarianism (ranging from full-throated condemnation to zealous endorsement) see SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH, SECOND HAND TIME: THE LAST OF THE SOVIETS (Bela Shayevich trans., Random House 2016) (2013). 1572 66 UCLA L. REV. 1532 (2019)

cautioned. Let’s get rid of the bad apples, modify the structure and culture a bit, and all should be acceptable, right?74  I began to appreciate some residents of East LA favored the regime. Indeed, though their numbers were small, they zealously endorsed the authoritarian practices. Enthusiasts of networked practices that targeted all of East LA regarded pachucos and pachucas as needing to be criminalized, kids missing school needing to be treated as truants, anyone skipping mass needing to be punished.75 One of the few in East LA, a Democrat and a Mexican American, urged my parents to understand that having my brother plea to a felony and do a few years in prison would be the best thing for his life. Prison, he proclaimed, was very much like the military: It straightened you out, made a man of you, and helped you return to civilian life mature, responsible, and forever chastened. (That’s exactly what happened—almost verbatim.)76  I began more fully than ever to recognize everyone who lived in East LA, in one or many ways, cooperated. One of the great lessons of my life was

74. In offering this rationalization, this segment of East LA residents tracked the stock script still routinely employed by law enforcement and local government officials when facing instances of horrifying law enforcement behavior, almost never acknowledging the structure and the culture of the institutions must be radically transformed, instead always insisting that there are only some “bad apples.” See Barbara E. Armacost, Organizational Culture and Police Misconduct, 72 GEO. WASH. L. REV. 453, 457 (2004). As Jennifer Lind notes, immediately following World War II, the German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer effectively blamed the Holocaust on a few bad apples: “[T]he German people abhorred the crimes committed against the Jews and did not participate in them.” JENNIFER LIND, SORRY STATES: APOLOGIES IN INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 110 (2008) (statement of Konrad Adenauer). 75. Among the many histories waiting to be written, we need some documenting the criminalization and incarceration enthusiasts among the residents of East LA, one measuring up to the quality of James Forman’s work describing the role prominent African Americans played in endorsing modern mass incarceration, fully appreciating that the policies and practices would disproportionately damage the Black communities they knew and probably Latinx communities they may not have had in mind. See FORMAN, supra note 1. 76. Of course, many Democrats preached this horrifically damaging homily, including California Governor Edmund G. (Pat) Brown (1959–1967), a former district attorney and , whose philosophy was: “You help people by locking them up, by putting them in institutions,” and “the more institutions the better.” JAN MARINISSEN, “TO LET THE LEGISLATURE KNOW”: PRISON ADVOCACY AND THE AMERICAN FRIENDS SERVICE COMMITTEE IN CALIFORNIA, 1960–1983 8 (1985). Perhaps such strong public views, and the popular bipartisan mainstream support they reflected, explain why some scholars call Los Angeles “the City of Inmates.” See KELLY LYTLE HERNÁNDEZ, CITY OF INMATES: CONQUEST, REBELLION, AND RISE OF HUMAN CAGING IN LOS ANGELES, 17711965 (2017). Perhaps Pat Brown’s zeal for building more and more prisons helps explain why some scholars see liberals as driving mass incarceration. See, e.g., NAOMI MURAKAWA, THE FIRST CIVIL RIGHT: HOW LIBERALS BUILT PRISON AMERICA (2014). Growing Up in Authoritarian 1950s East LA 1573

to watch the bravest people I knew—my parents and brother and grandfather and their friends and our neighbors—obey in circumstances I regarded as calling for an in-your-face challenge. They often submitted to unjustified and unaccountable assertions of authority to protect others, not least me and other children. They complied, too, because practices forced upon them severely limited options (to offer only some examples) in the labor and housing and lending markets,77 options wildly distant from those linked to the fully emancipated members of the national community poetically celebrated in our pledge of allegiance, in our national anthem, in the ostensible celebration of the revolution embodied by the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments and the revolutionary triumph they formally embodied.78  I began to realize that, even if by necessity my parents acquiesced far more than they would like, my Dad and Mom routinely challenged authoritarian practices. They did so in dealing with the cops on the beat, in dealing with teachers and principals, in dealing with health providers, bankers, and employers, in dealing with the County Board of Supervisors and with every agency and contracted private company hired by the county to help rule East LA, in dealing with the Catholic Church and its parishioners, nuns, priests, and cardinals. They did so, as others told me during my boyhood years and as my Mom later confirmed, in formally challenging repatriation, internment, and Operation Wetback.  I began to notice, in challenging authoritarian practices, my parents walked hand in hand. Temperamentally, my Dad and Mom could not have been more different: one calm and a person of few words, the other stormy and a person of many words. But when aiming to hold accountable

77. For how law establishes ground rules that incorporate inequality as a “naturalized” part of—already baked into—the coercive bargains at the heart of free-market regimes, Robert Hale’s work remains the point of departure. See, e.g., ROBERT L. HALE, FREEDOM THROUGH LAW: PUBLIC CONTROL OF PRIVATE GOVERNING POWER (1952); Robert L. Hale, Bargaining, Duress, and Economic Liberty, 43 COLUM. L. REV. 603 (1943); Robert L. Hale, Coercion and Distribution in a Supposedly Non-Coercive State, 38 POL. SCI. Q. 470 (1923); Robert L. Hale, Economics and Law, in THE SOCIAL SCIENCES AND THEIR INTERRELATIONS 131 (William Fielding Ogburn & Alexander Goldenweiser eds., 1927), https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.90438/page/n143; Robert L. Hale, Force and the State: A Comparison of “Political” and “Economic” Compulsion, 35 COLUM. L. REV. 149 (1935); Robert L. Hale, Prima Facie Torts Combination and Non-Feasance, 1946 INS. L.J. 538. 78. For an illuminating history of the role of Corporate America and Christian America in forcing the inclusion of “one nation under God” into the Pledge of Allegiance, see KEVIN M. KRUSE, ONE NATION UNDER GOD: HOW CORPORATE AMERICA INVENTED CHRISTIAN AMERICAN (2015). 1574 66 UCLA L. REV. 1532 (2019)

all these networked individuals, they became one: even tempered, direct, and persistent. They almost always lost. And losing so routinely was not at all easy for either of them. They were resilient but utterly human. And having to obey the cruelly wrong felt, at once, both awful and necessary to hold together their family, extended family, neighbors, and neighborhood.  I began to realize just how much my brother, like our Dad and Mom, stood up for himself and others in the face of authoritarian practices. When sovereigns on the street hurled racist barbs, my brother growled back. And when the gang of county sheriffs or Los Angeles police officers started attacking him, my brother fought back. He regarded it as self-defense, and I think he was right. But fighting gangs of cops on the street is risky, dangerous, and potentially deadly. In the joint, my brother stood up for himself and others in the face of vulgar practices. Even during the early days of serious prison gangs, prison guards always behaved arbitrarily and violently, insisting upon submission or else. My brother would not submit. Unsurprisingly, he was beaten a lot by gangs of guards. And he spent most of his days in the hole, solitary confinement, in penitentiaries like San Quentin, Soledad, and Folsom.79  I began to realize, through events I never could have predicted, just how vulnerable we all were, just how vulnerable we all are, especially all those living in places like targeted 1950s East LA. Some people lost jobs because they formally complained about harassing bosses. Others lost children and parents through deportation and incarceration. Still others lost homes to eminent domain proceedings making room for yet another freeway. Some lost classmates to juvenile hall or to poverty. Others lived in silence

79. During these years, I do not recall, and neither did my brother or Mom or anyone else, conversations raising concerns—much less addressing at length—the physical, mental, and emotional damage imposed by solitary confinement. For only a small illustration of modern interdisciplinary literature, see Cyrus Ahalt et al., Reducing the Use and Impact of Solitary Confinement in Corrections, 13 INT’L J. PRISONER HEALTH 41 (2017); Brian O. Hagan et al., History of Solitary Confinement Is Associated With Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Symptoms Among Individuals Recently Released From Prison, 95 J. URB. HEALTH 141 (2018); Craig Haney, The Psychological Effects of Solitary Confinement: A Systematic Critique, 47 CRIME & JUST. 365 (2018); Fatos Kaba et al., Solitary Confinement and Risk of Self-Harm Among Jail Inmates, 104 AM. J. PUB. HEALTH 442 (2014); Jeffrey L. Metzner & Jamie Fellner, Solitary Confinement and Mental Illness in U.S. Prisons: A Challenge for Medical Ethics, 38 J. AM. ACAD. PSYCHIATRY & L. 104 (2010); Glenn D. Walters, Do Restrictive Housing and Mental Health Need Add Up to Psychological Deterioration?, 45 CRIM. JUST. & BEHAVIOR 1347 (2018); Brie A. Williams, Older Prisoners and the Physical Health Effects of Solitary Confinement, 106 AM. J. PUB. HEALTH 2126 (2016); Note, The Cruelty: Recognizing Grave Mental Harm in American Prisons, 128 HARV. L. REV. 1250 (2015). Growing Up in Authoritarian 1950s East LA 1575

with their memories of internment camps or of being deported. Others still got ill, the kind of ill that quality health services would have controlled, but without which in short time would lead to incapacity and, in some instances, early deaths. Some lived with a self-loathing only the abused can understand. Some lost hope.  I began to realize that, for all their losses, for all their physical and emotional wounds, my parents held on to a feeling, a vision, that things did not have to be this way, either for Mexicans or any of the other exceptions. And somehow they seemed able, for the longest time, to never lose contact with that feeling, that vision. And that very idea helped them carry on, even when experiences made tangibly obvious that the fight had to be waged in all ways at once, in the everyday, and over one very long haul.  I began to realize just how concretely my parents always tried to make their vision. As the 1950s ended, my parents had already been working with a small group of other resident activists (including a Catholic priest, an astute activist and my parents’ friend) to mount a campaign to incorporate East LA. They had studied other municipal incorporations, understood the basic scheme, and grasped its variations. They had been through too much and knew too much truth to hoodwink themselves into thinking incorporation solved all problems. They did believe, however, achieving self-rule would largely rid them of certain pivotal players in the networks— particularly the County Board of Supervisors and the county sheriffs. And being able to elect their own officials, from among the City of East LA’s residents would strengthen their ability to ignore and confront the Catholic Church. Most of all, they regarded incorporation as the best way by far to establish and enforce accountability. Already before the decade’s finish, I found myself at work on all this political nitty-gritty, and I proudly did whatever my parents asked.  I began more fully than ever before to appreciate that, in my own heart, I wanted to secede. I wanted the multiracial and multicultural residents of East LA to secede from Los Angeles County, California, and the United States. No, I emphatically did not want East LA to become part of Mexico. In my eyes, Mexico regarded and treated those of us living in East LA in very much the same horrific ways the United States did.80 And the history of authoritarianism in Mexico rivaled the history of authoritarian practices in the United States. Instead, I wanted us to become our own

80. For a fuller elaboration on this and related themes, see Don’t We Like Them Illegal?, supra note 7. 1576 66 UCLA L. REV. 1532 (2019)

nation—the tiny national community of East LA. I figured the lives of East LA residents could not get any worse by declaring ourselves a sovereign nation—a place where we all would be accountable to one another and to ourselves. I had confidence we would find satisfaction and joy in aiming to make our tiny national community a place where exceptions would choose to live.  I began ever more deeply to appreciate that many people did not have a Mom and Dad like mine, who made their children feel totally safe, totally loved, totally like we could do absolutely whatever we wanted to do in the world, even when money remained scarce and the roof continued leaking and the plumbing routinely backing up, even in the midst of having relatives and friends and pintos my brother ran with staying with us for days and weeks and months, finding tentative yet real security in a safe house of sorts, in a house I was blessed to call my home.  And I knew, with ever-growing confidence, the sort of certainty that declares this is the truth, that even parents like mine could offer no assurance to themselves or anybody else that things would go well for anyone, and perhaps especially the kids, in our neighborhoods. Whether you are rich or poor, it helps to have money. Whether you are gifted or not, whether you are good or not, it helps to have luck.

B. One Story, One Interpretation

I realize East LA is just one place. And what I have sketched is just one story. There are a gazillion stories about thousands of places where, for decades and decades, Latinx communities have been targeted as an exception—in particular by the criminal justice system. Indeed, I can tell many other stories about the same years and the same weeks and the same days in 1950s East LA. And the stories should and would focus on characters whose experiences differ enough from the people and streets and the schools I feature here. And each story could illuminate varied experiences and understandings of what life in that decade was like for all those living in East LA.81 I realize, too, the truth as I know it may not at all be the truth you can see, are willing to see, or find convincing. You may make of life in 1950s East LA something very different than what I grew to believe utterly and unmistakably

81. I have always imagined many accounts of the same event and eras with the deep knowledge of broad ideologies and particular details that we can find, say, in Joseph Frank’s magnificent biography of Dostoevsky. For the one-volume version, see JOSEPH FRANK, DOSTOEVSKY: A WRITER IN HIS TIME (2010). Growing Up in Authoritarian 1950s East LA 1577

accurate. That I lived it and that I have studied it matter. Yet all that does not mean I offer the best understanding of what occurred. Others lived it too. And even those who did not might well, after deep and thorough research, write an account entirely different than mine or different enough to be appreciated. I mean appreciated in the strong sense of wondering if these other accounts amount to a different and formidable understanding that I can respect as plausible, credible, perhaps persuasive.

II. CULTIVATED DISRESPECT, DANGEROUS IGNORANCE

A. Cultivated Disrespect

Even if you utterly disagree with my view, it remains true that we ought to know this history. Life in 1950s East LA, and in earlier decades still, tells us much we ought to understand—just as the ideas, methods, and sensibilities that targeted Latinx communities all across the country ought to be understood. But far too few seem to notice. And, except for those who write about my generation’s Chicano and Puertorriqueño Movements and about more recent decades still,82 those who do notice and write mainly get ignored by others who write and speak.83 The 1950s appear to be regarded as quiescent, a nearly pre- or apolitical period, unworthy of scholarship, unworthy of readership. Instead of collectively excavating and examining the historical shards, instead of illuminating how and why life works as it does, scholars are perhaps too busy recycling and rebranding old theories, categories, and analyses. In claiming to care about and even speak on behalf of historically degraded communities, far too many of us ignore, obscure, and obliterate the very lives of those who have already been disrespected enough. When we ignore, obscure, and obliterate Latinx communities, even when we permit this to happen through inaction, we put Latinx at greater risk of remaining far too peripheral and inconsequential. To repeat what I have said bluntly for decades, Latinx must be recognized—no less than any other group. And we must be understood in all our complexity and, at the same time,

82. For one deeply respectful treatment of a book focusing on aspects of the starting in the mid-1960s, see Anthony V. Alfieri, Color/Identity/Justice: Chicano Trials, 53 DUKE L.J. 1569 (2004) (reviewing IAN F. HANEY LÓPEZ, RACISM ON TRIAL: THE CHICANO FIGHT FOR JUSTICE (2003)). 83. I have always thought a largely unappreciated strength of Rodolfo Acuña’s historical work has been his capacity to notice and record the politicized nature of all of East LA’s history, including the 1950s. See ACUÑA, supra note 23. 1578 66 UCLA L. REV. 1532 (2019)

recognized as a force sufficiently coherent to exercise clout. Basic recognition, some understanding, and occasional influence would seem elemental to membership in the national community. Every community—particularly if it has been regarded as exceptional—can come to be respected as fully human and equal only when diverse populations study, appreciate, and aim to understand it.84

B. Dangerous Ignorance

But when we ignore, obscure, and obliterate Latinx communities, the damage can be greater still. Disregard and discount what we can learn from Latinx communities and we risk not understanding how the criminal justice system (within the rule of law and as part of complex public, private, and civic networks) targets the Black community, the Native community, the Asian American community, the Pacific Islander community, the Muslim community, the Arab community, the low-income White community, the Jewish community, today and in the past. Authoritarian regimes—especially authoritarianism within the rule of law in democratic constitutionalism—borrow from what works in targeting one group in aiming its sights on others.85 Authoritarian practices targeting various exceptions amount to a menu of choices for how to treat the population in ways consistent with regarding them as subhuman—as a dangerous threat, as deviant, as scheming, as pathological, as never entitled to equal citizenship, as having no claim on holding those in power accountable.86 In very recent years, some I know well have experienced their own chastening lesson in just how much the United States has served as the model for authoritarian regimes we regard as utterly contrary to all we believe ourselves to be and to stand for in the global community. After the campaign and election of November 2016, many friends and allies came to believe the Trump Administration and its ardent supporters behaved in severely

84. See, e.g., Learning About Latinos, supra note 19. 85. In her characteristically knowledgeable and insightful work, Scheppele demonstrates how Orbán borrowed from earlier Hungarian autocrats, Putin, and Erdoğan; how Poland and Egypt borrowed from Orbán; how Venezuela’s Chávez influenced Ecuador’s Correa and may have influenced Orbán. See Kim Lane Scheppele, Autocratic Legalism, 85 U. CHI. L. REV. 545 (2018). 86. In my view, both the United States and Mexico developed and employed just such a menu of choices in creating a system of undocumented Mexican migration to the United States, one operating parallel to and interacting with the system of documented migration of Mexicans. For a full development of the history and contemporary dynamics, see Don’t We Like Them Illegal?, supra note 7. Growing Up in Authoritarian 1950s East LA 1579

authoritarian rather than robustly accountable ways toward particular exceptional groups. My friends and allies regarded the then new administration as an aberration, discontinuous with what the United States had been, with the rule of law at the heart of our constitutional democracy. My friends and allies acknowledged Democrats had themselves engaged in flights from accountability and toward authoritarian practices. The Obama Administration did not escape scrutiny and condemnation. Yet they insisted the Trump Administration is different than the history of the United States. “We aren’t simply better than that; we are at odds with all that.” My friends and allies began to study earlier authoritarian states of every sort (autocratic, totalitarian, fascist—to list only the most prominent labels they would use). What they learned proved sobering. In particular, they had never appreciated how much the United States has served as not just an example but the model for diverse authoritarian regimes they regard, together with most others in this nation, as utterly contrary to all we believe ourselves to be and to stand for in the global community. To take only one example, my friends and allies examined the work produced by scholars of Nazi Germany. These interdisciplinary historians wrote about how, at least during its early years, Hitler’s regime and especially talented German lawyers assiduously studied the United States’ history before and after the Civil War.87 These elite Nazi lawyers did so because, after conducting careful comparative research, they had concluded that, of all the nations on earth, the United States offered the deepest and widest set of examples for learning how best to handle groups of people targeted as less than fully human and certainly not entitled to full membership in the national community. Of course, these German lawyers carefully investigated slavery and Jim Crow laws. Yet they found most illuminating how the United States had managed Chinese and Japanese and Filipinos and Mexicans and Puerto Ricans—how it had manipulated immigration and citizenship laws, how it had governed its colonies. Nazi Germany’s Nuremberg laws (the anti-Jewish legislation, enacted in 1935, creating a formal race order through new forms of second-class citizenship and bans on interracial sex and marriage) trace their origins to the various authoritarian practices and policies the United States had developed to surveil and control groups it regarded as utterly inferior and

87. For the story as told by a first-rate legal historian, see JAMES Q. WHITMAN, HITLER’S AMERICAN MODEL: THE UNITED STATES AND THE MAKING OF NAZI RACE LAW (2017). 1580 66 UCLA L. REV. 1532 (2019)

unworthy.88 These victories of severe authoritarianism over robust accountability were overwhelmingly regarded as comfortably within the rule of law in a constitutional democracy, as legitimate interpretations of the U.S. Constitution, laws, and practices.89 My friends and allies learning about Nazi Germany to understand and resist the Trump Administration came very reluctantly to understand they were looking in a mirror: The Nazi Nuremberg Laws—and all its practices delegated through public and civil and private networks targeting Jews—were a direct reflection of how the United States has, through and within the rule of law, treated various groups it has regarded as exceptions. The Trump Administration’s targeting of exceptions was both an extension of a long bipartisan history and a normal expression of the rule of law within our constitutional democracy. Do not think, please, that the lessons we can and should learn lie only in the past or only in places as horrifying as Nazi Germany. We can learn from contemporary events and distant eras. We can learn from countries we regard as like ours and unlike ours. We can learn from places within and across the United States where networked powers target exceptions, as they did in 1950s East LA. The dangers of ignorance—even and especially the earnest self- congratulatory sort—demand fearless investigation.

III. LIVING WITHIN THE REAL RULE OF LAW IN OUR CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRACY

On Memorial Day 2019 I heard tributes again paid to the “Greatest Generation” who helped free the world of Nazi tyranny. To honor all those who over millennia have fought lethal and brutal autocratic rule, we do not have to buy into the singling out of World War II veterans, much less accept this preposterous label.90 Yet there is no denying we saturate certain holidays,

88. For some additional histories offering this account, see generally DAVID SCOTT FITZGERALD & DAVID COOK-MARTIN, CULLING THE MASSES: THE DEMOCRATIC ORIGINS OF RACIST IMMIGRATION POLICIES IN THE AMERICAS (2014); IAN KERSHAW, HITLER: 1889– 1936: HUBRIS (1998); STEFAN KÜHL, THE NAZI CONNECTION: EUGENICS, AMERICAN RACISM, AND GERMAN NATIONAL SOCIALISM (1994); MARILYN LAKE & HENRY REYNOLDS, DRAWING THE GLOBAL COLOUR LINE: WHITE MEN’S COUNTRIES AND THE INTERNATIONAL CHALLENGE OF RACIAL EQUALITY (2008); STEVEN H. NORWOOD, THE THIRD REICH IN THE IVORY TOWER: COMPLICITY AND CONFLICT ON AMERICAN CAMPUSES (2009). 89. For one forthright and sophisticated account, see WHITMAN, supra note 87, 132–61. 90. Tom Brokaw is most often credited for popularizing this label. See TOM BROKAW, THE GREATEST GENERATION (1998). Growing Up in Authoritarian 1950s East LA 1581

even more than we do all other days, with our own particular brand of propagandistic spirit. As a national community, we seem to yearn for and embrace as truth the hyperbolic, the sanitized, the downright misleading. This tradition may not distinguish us from France, China, and Mexico. Indeed, perhaps all nations engage in symbolic legitimacy, signaling to outsiders and perhaps especially insiders that “we indeed are special.”91 In any event, the 2019 Memorial Day messages certainly confirm we still like our accomplishments to be heroic, our heroes pure, and our constitutional democracy the global model of national governance. Nothing I heard on May 27, 2019, spoke of the fact that some of these World War II veterans returned home to help impose authoritarian practices on targeted exceptions, including those of us living in 1950s East LA. Principally through the criminal justice system, they led and staffed and otherwise enabled the networks surveilling and controlling and imprisoning us. They regarded as self-evident equating Mexicans with criminality. They backed the massive deportations of Operation Wetback. They defended the internment of Japanese Americans. Nothing I heard on May 27, 2019, spoke of the fact that still others of these World War II veterans returned home to again live on the receiving end of targeted authoritarian practices, including those of us living in 1950s East LA. These veterans experienced the surveillance and control and imprisonment pursued by networks of systems, institutions, and individuals, spearheaded by the criminal justice system. They knew full well most others (including some of their fellow vets) equated Mexicans with criminality, endorsed Operation Wetback, rationalized the internment of Japanese Americans. Nothing I heard on May 27, 2019, acknowledged that these veterans did all this—fought in World War II and targeted and were targeted as exceptions within the United States—through and within the rule of law. Indeed, through and within the rule of law, racism and misogyny continued as the norm within the very military forces saluted as without equal across history.92 Through and

91. It is impossible for me to read Alex Wang’s uncommonly perceptive scholarship about China and not regard his notion of symbolic legitimacy as at work, if in distinctive ways, in every nation. See Wang, supra note 66. 92. For only illustrations of the literature, see ALISON R. BERNSTEIN, AMERICAN INDIANS AND WORLD WAR II: TOWARD A NEW ERA IN INDIAN AFFAIRS (1991); BEYOND THE LATINO WORLD WAR II HERO (Maggie Rivas-Rodríguez & Emilio Zamora eds., 2009); GAIL BUCKLEY, AMERICAN PATRIOTS: THE STORY OF BLACKS IN THE MILITARY FROM THE REVOLUTION TO DESERT STORM (2001); EMILY YELLIN, OUR MOTHERS’ WAR: AMERICAN WOMEN AT HOME AND AT THE FRONT DURING WORLD WAR II (2004); BILL YENNE, RISING 1582 66 UCLA L. REV. 1532 (2019)

within the rule of law, the barbaric behavior of the Western forces typically went overlooked and excused while the Germans and the Japanese were deemed the unparalleled masters of cruelty.93 Some would declare, I imagine, that the United States needs its delusions. We do not always long for candor. Or at least we shouldn’t. And, as the argument would run, we do not and should not desire candor about the rule of law. Instead, we need both profoundly heartfelt and transparently duplicitous praise of what I am describing as a thoroughly misleading version of the rule of law. We need E.P. Thompson offering his remarkably sophisticated and powerfully earnest shout-out,94 and we need Donald Trump (only the most recent in a long list of presidents) offering his transparently two-faced salute to the rule of law.95 Even among some who understand that authoritarian and accountability practices coexist within the rule of law and cannot be eradicated, there persists the conviction that faith in our particular brand of constitutional democracy demands the embrace of the very hyperbolic, sanitized, and misleading patriotic propaganda we might otherwise renounce.96 I do not claim to understand everyone’s relationship to faith, religious or secular. And in the past, I have certainly underestimated the lasting power of deep denial in failing to come to grips with transnational dynamics.97 Yet I remain vehemently

SONS: THE JAPANESE AMERICAN GIS WHO FOUGHT FOR THE UNITED STATES IN WORLD WAR II (2007). 93. Of the vast and diverse literature about the realities of war, why not begin with one of the most exquisite accounts? See PAUL FUSSELL, WARTIME: UNDERSTANDING AND BEHAVIOR IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR (1989). 94. It may be impossible to exaggerate the brilliance of Thompson’s work in Whigs and Hunters, even if, for me, he appears to celebrate what I regard as a misleading version of the rule of law. See E.P. THOMPSON, WHIGS AND HUNTERS: THE ORIGIN OF THE BLACK ACT (1975). Others, like Morty Horwitz, have found Thompson’s book disappointing and, though for reasons different from my own, question Thompson’s celebration of the rule of law as an unqualified human good. See, e.g., Morton J. Horwitz, The Rule of Law: An Unqualified Human Good? 86 YALE L.J. (1977) (reviewing THOMPSON, supra). Still others, like Rick Abel, have very recently emphatically embraced and centrally featured Thompson’s celebration and description of the rule of law. See ABEL, supra note 11. 95. For the role of presidents interwoven with many other powerful dynamics in a superb study of the rule of law, see id.; RICHARD L. ABEL, LAW’S TRIALS: THE PERFORMANCE OF LEGAL INSTITUTIONS IN THE US “WAR ON TERROR” (2018). 96. Or at least so I read what various authors appear to be saying—in some instances quite explicitly. See, e.g., Norman W. Spaulding, States of Authoritarianism in Liberal Democratic Regimes, in AUTHORITARIAN CONSTITUTIONALISM, supra note 49, at 265; Adrian Vermeule, Our Schmittian Administrative Law, 122 HARV. L. REV. 1095 (2009). 97. See Don’t We Like Them Illegal?, supra note 7. Growing Up in Authoritarian 1950s East LA 1583

opposed to any faith that insists we must remain loyal to the make-believe version of the rule of law.98 Buying into, or even perhaps tolerating too often, the misleadingly self- congratulatory version of the rule of law enhances the likelihood that we never spot the very movements aiming to sabotage accountability, especially among those networks led by or entirely capable of recruiting the criminal justice system to legitimate their autocratic aspirations and practices.99 That certainly has been what I have witnessed in my lifetime. That certainly is how some activists, women and men demonstrably brave in the face of authoritarianism, naturally experienced the Trump Administration as discontinuous with the United States’ past. Shouldn’t we want to feel the ground moving beneath our feet? Especially if later so many will confidently contend who could ever have anticipated such a seismic shift? Especially if this cycle becomes habitual? The rather routine failure to spot authoritarian practices targeting exceptions followed by the equally routine astonishment that this ever could have happened in the United States? The familiar inability or unwillingness to identify flights from accountability simply because the chief executive did not declare a state of emergency? Simply because the make-believe version of the rule of law regards robust accountability as coextensive with law’s assumptions, methods, and aspirations? Simply because the targeted now and then use law, as one means in an ensemble of strategies, to challenge those targeting them and sometimes (if all too rarely) succeed?100

98. For contrasting explorations of constitutional faith, the Constitution as civil religion, and similar traditions and kindred phenomena, see JACK M. BALKIN, CONSTITUTIONAL REDEMPTION: POLITICAL FAITH IN AN UNJUST WORLD (2011); SANFORD LEVINSON, CONSTITUTIONAL FAITH (1988); Duncan Kennedy, American Constitutionalism as Civil Religion: Notes of an Atheist, 19 NOVA L. REV, 909, 917 (1995) (“Note that [constitutional] atheism is perfectly consistent with the belief that there are correct and incorrect interpretations of constitutional law.”). For my own views of how Chicanx have and should celebrate the Constitution in ways radically divergent from the grand tradition, see López, The Idea of a Constitution in the Chicano Tradition, supra note 15. The political theorist Hanna Fenichel Pitkin excavates the ambiguities of a constitution in all her work. See, e.g., Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The Idea of the Constitution, 37 J. LEGAL EDUC. 167 (1987). 99. Though our definitions of rule of law conflict, Scheppele has directed her considerable talents to identifying how autocrats use law to create authoritarian regimes out of constitutional democracies. See Scheppele, supra note 85. 100. For an example of my elaboration of this point, see Gerald P. López, Shaping Community Problem Solving Around Community Knowledge, 79 N.Y.U. L. REV. 59 (2004). 1584 66 UCLA L. REV. 1532 (2019)

Even if denial indeed serves important ends,101 I resolutely insist that repeating to one another and celebrating the horribly inaccurate version of the rule of law thoroughly damages and does not help those most routinely targeted by authoritarian practices. We residents of 1950s East LA felt the force of the networked systems, institutions, and individuals targeting us. We felt the punishing power of such a network led and backstopped by the coercive clout of the criminal justice system. We felt the realities of the full expanse of the contradictory choices available through and within the rule of law. We knew never to call the cops—never to ask law enforcement—for help. And we did not. We knew always to anticipate utterly arbitrary treatment by those across the networks targeting us. And most often that is exactly what we got. We knew every moment of each day could turn ugly, and sometimes did, with every capricious impulse of elected and appointed officials, journalists and their editors and publishers, coworkers and supervisors, fellow parishioners in and leaders of the Catholic Church. We residents of 1950s East LA knew what it felt like to contrast our daily lives through and within the rule of law with the make-believe platitudes of Memorial Day. I recall some of the many questions we asked one another. Exactly whose interests did the make-believe version of the rule of law serve?102 And for those who would then have maintained that our nation can cohere only through a collective faith in this fantasy (or at least through the repetition of these rituals), exactly what assumptions drove this conviction? That only elites like themselves and not everyday people can handle the truth?103 I did not believe during my childhood and I do not believe today that being forthright about living within the rule of law undermines the national community. I find it ridiculous when anyone maintains that being real about the rule of law leads inevitably to, or amounts to, a corrosive cynicism or a nothing-really-matters nihilism.104 I do because I have known, throughout my life, people who understood profoundly the contradictions defining the choices made available through and within the rule of law. In significant

101. The classic work remains ANNA FREUD, THE EGO AND THE MECHANISMS OF DEFENSE (Cecil Baines trans., Routledge rev. ed. 2018) (1936). 102. Of the many important publications to read and reread about interests served and not served by the rule of law, all should be certain to absorb CATHERINE A. MACKINNON, SEXUAL HARASSMENT OF WORKING WOMEN (1979). 103. For an example of my view of such assumptions, see Gerald P. López, The Work We Know So Little About, 42 STAN. L. REV. 1 (1989). 104. In response to various liberals labeling as nihilists anyone who would describe law as routinely permitting choice between contradictory options, Joe Singer wrote an article that remains an important read. See Joseph William Singer, The Player and the Cards: Nihilism and Legal Theory, 94 YALE L.J. 1 (1984). Growing Up in Authoritarian 1950s East LA 1585

numbers, rather than being cynical or nihilistic, these everyday folks welcomed the responsibility of holding one another and themselves accountable. Indeed, both in 1950s East LA and in many other places and decades, the people I have known understand that the rule of law within a constitutional democracy is not something we have or something we are. Instead, living within the rule of law is something we do.105 We do it—or we can and should do it—fully appreciative of the ineradicably contradictory nature of the elections we may make and the trajectories we may pursue. Always in the muck, we do what we do within the rule of law as one expression of a struggle in which some win and others lose, where the truces last only so long, where the losers always aim in the future to alter the new status quo, to impose their vision, at least for as long as they can.

EPILOGUE

How I wish my Dad, Mom, and brother had never left those Arizona mining towns. I wished that as a child, and I wish that today. Those Arizona mining towns were racist, segregated, and often brutal—steadily enough targeting exceptions through authoritarian practices. Yet I am convinced, and so were my brother, Mom, and Dad, that staying in Prescott or Jerome would have left them all better off—more fulfilled and joyful, less confused and confounded, more appreciated and even honored. Whatever challenges they would have certainly faced in either of those towns could not have been worse than what they experienced during their decades in East LA. I saw on their faces and in their spirits the stress of always having to anticipate extreme and demeaning arbitrariness, constantly having to prepare for volatile and volcanic cruelty, perpetually having to worry about losing people they loved. I saw the pain, anguish, and suffering they endured, just as I saw the pain, anguish, and suffering so many others around us endured. Of course, all three of them sometimes capitulated, often to protect others, neighbors and friends and relatives and children. They despised capitulation and perhaps derided themselves for submitting to domination. Mainly, though, they were astonishingly robust and persevering in their intransigence. They were not going to accept all these networked systems, institutions, and individuals targeting us, or targeting any of the other

105. In this particular riff, I repeat myself and join certain others, including Hanna Fenichel Pitkin. See Pitkin, supra note 98. 1586 66 UCLA L. REV. 1532 (2019)

exceptions within and beyond the boundaries of East LA. They were brave, and all that bravery just wore them down, wore them down to the vanishing point, wore them down to painful death. Had they stayed in Jerome or Prescott, I would have grown up in a small Arizona mining town. I would have learned lots in those mining towns, and I would have figured out a way to be a man from a small town. Or perhaps I would have just stayed put, never ventured out. I might have worked a ranch, coached youth sports, sang in some stinky bar. I can imagine being happy doing any of those things or perhaps combining them in some ways. Still, for me, East LA was just the right place to do my growing up. I can still feel both the thrill of playing on the Eastman Elementary School blacktop and the mixed reception as my friends and I competed all across Southern California. I can still see the generous couple who ran the local tortilleria, the two heartless sheriff deputies who regularly patrolled the streets of our neighborhood, the magnetic Infante and Negrete on the stage at the Million Dollar. I can still smell the menudo on a Sunday morning and the killing of pigs at a famous slaughterhouse. I can still hear my chickens clucking and my pigeons cooing inside their coop and the feral cats screeching as they fought the huge rats inside the broom factory. I can still detect the odor of alcohol on the breath of both the kind old priest arriving to say the 5:45 a.m. mass and, about thirty minutes later, the coldhearted parishioner kneeling to receive Holy Communion. I can still experience the bliss of cruising with my brother to Laguna Park and the desolation of seeing him caged in a penitentiary. I can still relive the joy of watching my parents dance and the torment of watching them get beat down in their efforts trying to hold accountable so many sovereigns on the street. From my earliest memories, I treasured all I lived through, even and especially what initially felt puzzling and enraging. The 1950s East LA of my boyhood, at least at its best, taught me to be unflinching. Not unfeeling— unflinching. If we are to understand Latinx communities, race, and the criminal justice system, we must openly acknowledge how regularly throughout our history and how routinely today local, state, regional, and national networks target exceptions through and within the rule of law. To pretend otherwise, to invoke the make-believe rule of law (robustly accountable) as the actual rule of law (at least as authoritarian as accountable), is to persist in living within tangled lies. Disillusioned, stripped of these lies and living far less invested in patriotic propaganda, we can then see what we apparently insist on avoiding or somehow regard as trite. Through and within the actual rule of law, we make Growing Up in Authoritarian 1950s East LA 1587

our own worlds. We must make them over and over again. And we do today, as we do always, in the midst of struggles. To be sure, struggles entail an incomprehensibly enigmatic mix of cooperation and conflict—pervaded by nastiness and sweetness, threats and assurances, massacres and rescues. They can leave us bewildered, unnerved, and exhausted. Yet we should not let any patrician or coward or life coach convince us we are not in the mix of struggles. Whitewashing denials be damned. We already know what history teaches. At least we should when we are ferociously honest. We cannot build anything permanently effective in protecting us against others or ourselves. If we choose accountability to one another and to ourselves, the next day we must choose it again, and then again, and then again. We must do so even and especially when we feel most threatened. We must do so when the allure of doing what we please with our power remains an always available option. If we cannot trust ourselves to never declare others exceptions, what then can we rely upon, if anything? Look for no magic answer, either from me or from anyone else. Trust no faith, religious or secular, to guarantee the influence of the better angels in our nature. Beware charlatans and even well- intentioned leaders, from those proclaiming we are one undivided nation to those decreeing we can never find community in this altogether alienated existence. What I have experienced, though, as the most powerful force at work among the residents of 1950s East LA and within other targeted people with whom I have worked could not be more basic. In the face of often severe and utterly normalized authoritarian practices, often aiming to realize (in miniature and for a while) a practicable utopia, some of us had moments, others of us had phases, and still others had lengthy periods approaching a full lifetime’s worth of insisting: THERE IS SOME SHIT I SHALL NOT EAT.