Chicana/o Latina/o Law Review

Este capítulo explora estas dinámicas enfocándose en las élites mexicanas, que proactivamente navegaron la transición desde el orden racial hispano-mexicano hacia el orden racial anglo-estadounidense. En su estudio sobre Hawái, la antropóloga Sally Merry ha identificado “la ambigua y contradictoria posición de las élites colonizadas” que respondían a la colonización estadounidense allí “con varios grados de complicidad, resistencia y acomodamiento.”5 La posición de las élites mexicanas bajo la colonización estadounidense fue igualmente fracturada y compleja. La doble colonización de Nuevo México, como una región colonizada primero por los españoles y luego por los estadounidenses, hizo que la posición de las élites nativas fuera especialmente delicada. En el momento de la invasión estadounidense, las élites mexicanas incluyeron al pequeño grupo de verdaderos colonos españoles, pero también a una gran proporción de mestizos que habían escalado más alto en la escalera del estatus social, desarrollando estrategias de movilidad racial y social descritas en el anterior capítulo. Para la mayoría de las élites mestizas, las dos colonizaciones no podían haber sido más diferentes: en la primera fueron los colonizadores, los “colonos” quienes fueron los sujetos de la empresa colonial; en la segunda, ellos eran los “nativos”, el objeto que experimentaba a los colonizadores estadounidenses.

Legal scholars and sociologists have explored the dynamics of gentrification in New York City. Yet, comparatively fewer scholars, among them Professor Tarry Hum, Chair of the Queens College Department of Urban Studies, have written about the matrix of class, immigration, and displacement in Sunset Park. No legal scholarship currently looks into the fight for Industry City. This Article seeks to document the processes of gentrification and rezoning as they have manifested in Sunset Park, vis-à-vis the fight to rezone Industry City. Parts I and II provide a primer on gentrification and rezoning before narrowing in on Industry City and arguments against rezoning that are particular to this area. Though I focus on the uniqueness of Sunset Park, I argue that the fight over Industry City is not a one-off example of corporate entrepreneurship lured by the promise of a working waterfront. Rather, this rezoning proposal is the natural progeny to decades of government failures and corporate lobbying efforts and is a successor in interest to the fraught rezoning proposals that have reshaped the City since the start of the new millennium. Part III offers potential solutions and strategies to combat displacement and gentrification in Industry City and throughout the New York area.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of immigrants appear before the immigration courts in removal proceedings. Removal proceedings have long raised issues regarding due process and an immigrant’s rights. The statutory right to counsel is one such right that inspires such questions of due process. Although noncitizens have a statutory right to counsel in immigration courts, the government has no obligation to provide an attorney to those who cannot afford one.

The problem is that immigration judges are denying the statutory right to counsel in removal proceedings; therefore, noncitizens are appearing before immigration judges without a crucial procedural safeguard. Noncitizens with counsel are more likely to seek relief from removal and actually win their case. There is a circuit split as to whether federal circuit courts should require a noncitizen to show that they were prejudiced by lack of counsel in removal proceedings.

This Comment argues that the federal circuit courts should not require prejudice when the immigrant has been denied their right to counsel because, under the Accardi Doctrine, an agency must abide by its own regulations when those regulations pertain to a party’s rights. The consequences of removal are similar in severity to those in criminal law. Therefore, immigrants must have the right to counsel if they have not expressly waived it in order to effectuate a meaningful hearing. Not only are the consequences of removal severe, but the immigration system is already so inherently prejudicial to immigrants that proving prejudice would be a waste of resources. Immigration laws are complex and filled with subjective standards; the immigration system is not an impartial tribunal; and immigration courts have become increasingly weaponized over the past few years. Therefore federal circuit courts should not require an immigrant to show that lack of counsel prejudiced their proceedings.

On October 11, 2019, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed the strictest ban on private prisons in the country. California Assembly Bill (AB) 32 would phase out all privately-run prisons, including immigration prisons, by 2028. As the first prison abolition legislation of its kind in the United States, AB 32 brought to light the mounting concern regarding the cruel nature of immigrant detention as well as increasing outrage over serious abuses at for-profit prisons.

This article is the first to explore this landmark legislation and analyze its legal and policy implications in the movement for immigrant prison abolition. After setting forth a brief history on the growth of private detention, this article discusses AB 32’s pathway through the courts. The article concludes by arguing that AB 32 can serve as an important illustration for other states where federal action has fallen short. While in 2021 President Biden signed an executive order to end Department of Justice contracts with private prisons for criminal detention, the order did not apply to immigration detention. States can adopt legislation like AB 32 to play a role in eradicating immigrant prisons across the country.

The CROWN Act is a huge achievement for multiple jurisdictions in the United States. However, legal shifts alone cannot do the work of dismantling a systemic culture of anti-Blackness in public and private space. This Article argues that profound cultural shifts must accompany political and legal shifts around an anti-Black history of hair policing. One example of a cultural shift advanced by Black activists, creators, and artists is the creation of natural hair salons, a social space that performsthe work of celebrating Black hair amid a harmful culture of respectability politics and Eurocentrism.

To advance this argument, this Article focuses on the happenstance of the passage of the CROWN Act at the same time as another significant development in the United States: the opening of Miss Rizos Salon in New York City. Miss Rizos Salon made its own name as one of the first natural hair salons in the Dominican Republic, an achievement borne of Black-centered organizing against structural and interpersonal anti-Blackness. Dominican salons in both the Dominican Republic and in the United States have served as common sites of pelo bueno versus pelo malo due to the Dominican salon’s established trait as the place clients go to straighten or relax hair. Today, the reclamation of this space into a reimagined site for the celebration of natural hair creates a promising venue for tackling anti-Black attitudes towards natural hair that cannot easily be addressed by legal regimes. It is this transnational movement of Black organizing that is the direct rebuttal to the command “arréglate ese pajón.” Rather than acquiesce to the command, the Black transnational natural hair movement responds by obliterating the white supremacist projects that created the command.