"Wetback" Making A Comeback

There are some words that have rightly been banished out of the lexicon of everyday conversation. They are loaded with hate, xenophobia and ignorance. Those who choose to use them are quite aware of their volatility, but have seen an opening lately to allow their bigoted views to be trotted out.

Charles Laws, a water company executive whom local officials are calling on to resign, on Friday defended his decision to characterize a proposed detention facility for illegal immigrants as a "holding pen for wetbacks."

Laws said "wetback" is widely acknowledged to mean immigrants who swim the Rio Grande and enter the United States illegally, not American citizens. Laws said the term is not racial, an assertion that others dispute. He said he wishes he had not used the wordin an agenda item for the Creedmoor-Maha Water Supply Corp.'s board of directors but will not resign over it.

He said he thinks the politicians calling for his resignation are in effect defending criminals who should not be in the United States.

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Mr. Laws, who is the Mayor Pro Tem of Mustang Ridge, TX, remains indignant and uses the old "I'm sorry if I offended anyone" excuse for a term that has a dark history in the U.S.

In 1954, even the federal government used the term. The Immigration and Naturalization Service launched Operation Wetback, which sought to remove vast numbers of undocumented immigrants and focused heavily on California and Texas, particularly the Rio Grande Valley.

Historians say thousands of legal immigrants and U.S. citizens of Mexican descent were rounded up in the mass deportations.

Immigration agents routinely approached working-class Mexican Americans and questioned them, said Jose Limón, director of the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas.

"A lot of people who remember that must surely take offense that they are characterized that way, as people who are here illegally," Limón said.

"In saying 'wetback,' you're saying Mexican of a lower and marginalized and illegal class. I think that's why a lot of Mexican Americans would take offense. ... Some of them were born here."

Plascencia said that both inside and outside the immigration debate, that slur and other labels serve to objectify the subject as less than human.

"They all function the same way: All are intended to distance (the user) and at the same time assert superiority," Plascencia said.

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Yup.