Media Contact: Alondra Ponce, alondra.ponce.432@my.csun.edu, or Javier Rojas, javier.rojas@csun.edu
California State University, Northridge criminology and justice studies associate professor Eric Gamino will discuss the “human cost of the migration experience” as part of a talk next week about his latest book, “Enforcing Order on the Border: Race, Policing, and Immigration Enforcement in South Texas.”
The event — scheduled to take place on Tuesday, March 24, from 3 to 4:15 p.m. at the Whitsett Room in Sierra Hall on the west side of the campus 18111 Nordhoff St. in Northridge — will explore the experiences of Latinos/as at the US-Mexico border in Texas and how racialized assumptions drive surveillance and control.
“Readers will be able to see the human cost of the migration experience,” said Gamino said. “In my book, I provide further insight into my interactions with immigrants and asylum seekers, and the experiences through the US-Mexico borderlands as they attempted to cross into the interior of the United States.”
Gamino, who spent 11 years as a Texas police officer, said readers of his book can learn about the long history of local police working with federal immigration officials, the intra-ethnic conflict between Mexican Americans and Mexicans that predates the 1940 and how it still exists today.
“The book is an autoethnography,” he said. “It is a combination of my personal experiences and academic analysis. I talk about my lived experiences as a police officer and how I had to navigate that conflicted space as being a child of Mexican immigrants, but now working as a police officer and some of the practices conflicting with my own moral issues.
“One of the main points that I want to take home with the book is to inform immigration policy with regards to immigrants, asylum seekers, and to humanize them for what they are, which is humans, and view them as contributing as opposed to a threat to this country,” Gamino said.
The book includes stories of Gamino’s interactions with asylum seekers and immigrants as well as the conversations he had with them about their reason for coming to the United States. Attendees of the talk will learn how enforcement is not only about security, but also about managing people, space and belonging.
For more information about the talk, email CJS@csun.edu
The CSUN Department of Criminology and Justice Studies promotes the theoretical, analytical and practical understanding of crime, victimization and the criminal justice system from a social scientific perspective. The program provides students with a foundation for the study of criminology and criminal justice based in critical thinking and application.
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