Picturing the Pain of Others: Ken Gonzales-Day's Latino Hang Trees

0. Review: The "Mexican War"
























[Printed at the Eagle and Advocate Office, [Philadelphia] offering 160 acres, a $12 bounty, and pay of $10 per month. Posted by Capt. Pemberton Waddell.]

"A Few More VOLUNTEERS Wanted for the MEXICAN WAR!"

"One can sign up for the length of the war or five years, at the Armory - The Oregon House, or some other places, including over Sutton's Bowling Saloon!"

I. Necrocitizenship/Cultural Citizenship
Police Gang Tyrannized Latinos


















East Haven, Connecticut police officers rooted through stores looking for damning security videotapes of how they had treated some of their targets, described by one of them on a police radio as having “drifted to this country on rafts made of chicken wings.”

NYT: "They were known as Miller’s Boys, police officers who worked the 4-to-midnight shift, patrolling the largely working-class town of East Haven, Conn., including the small but growing Hispanic community that has spread out in recent years from New Haven.

The officers were more than well known in that community; according to residents and federal authorities, they were feared. They stopped and detained people, particularly immigrants, without reason, federal prosecutors said, sometimes slapping, hitting or kicking them when they were handcuffed, and once smashing a man’s head into a wall. They followed and arrested residents, including a local priest, who tried to document their behavior."

II. Writing Violence on the Latino Body: Gonzales-Day's Erased Lynching Series

Lynching in the West
LYNCHING IN THE WEST:1850-1935 (2006)
KEN GONZALES-DAY

Ken Gonzales-Day's Lynching in the West began as an effort to expand the historical record on lynching in California, and in doing so, discovered that contrary to the vast majority of published texts and histories on California, that frontier justice and vigilantism were not always a racially neutral set of practices.

The book includes a detailed appendix, assembled by the author, of individual cases of lynching and other forms of public execution. The appended case lists reveals that in California, Latinos of Mexican and Latin American descent were more likely to be lynched than any other racial, ethnic or national group. The book also considers how eighteenth and nineteenth century theories of race, nationality and ethnicity, may have contributed to this history.

From the vigilance committee to the antilynching movement, lynching touched nearly every community in the United States, and continues to serve as a catalyst for thinking about race, ethnicity, and national identity today.

III. Without Sanctuary

Without Sanctuary