A friend from Douglas sent me this link. I
remember this very well. Tom was a student in the third grade class I
worked in during my senior year in high school. I loved him. I got to
know him again during my time in Douglas as he is very involved in the
Elks Club. I still believe that he is a good person who got involved
in some family dynamics that weren't so positive. This goes along with
the post I did about our grandfather and the KKK. I remember my mom in particular being upset about this. I copied and pasted and can't get it to look exactly the way I would like, but all of the info is still here.
I am trying to show the history of Douglas when our family was so involved in politics, etc.
From Hanigan to SB 1070: How Arizona Got to Where It
Is Today
by Geraldo Cadava
A native of Tucson, Arizona, Geraldo Cadava teaches history at Northwestern University. Harvard University Press will publish "The Heat of Exchange," his book about culture and commerce in the Arizona-Sonora border region since World War II. This article is excerpted from a longer essay to be published by the Immigration Policy Center, the research and policy arm of the American Immigration Council. IPC's materials can be found at www.immigrationpolicy.org. Exactly thirty-four years ago, on August 18, 1976, white ranchers in southern Arizona kidnapped, tortured, and robbed three Mexican migrants who crossed the border at Douglas on their way to Elfrida, where farm work awaited them. For the next five years, until trials of the ranchers ended, the incident drew |
international attention.
This past March, rancher Robert Krentz was murdered just a few
miles from where the Hanigans tortured their victims. While
authorities have not arrested any suspects for the crime,
allegations that an undocumented immigrant murdered Krentz
caused the political firestorm that brought passage of Arizona’s
controversial immigration law, SB 1070. Though it is mostly
forgotten, the Hanigan Case, named for the implicated ranchers,
occurred at a strikingly similar historical moment, offering
important lessons as we once again debate the future of Mexican
immigration to the United States.
Manuel García Loya, Eleazar Ruelas Zavala, and Bernabe Herrera—men between the ages of 18 and 25—all held jobs in Mexico, but came north for higher wages. Their path took them across a ranch owned by the Hanigans. Thomas and Patrick Hanigan, sons of George Hanigan, spotted the migrants from their pickup truck. After demanding that the Mexicans explain why they were in the United States, the brothers bound them, forced them into their truck, and drove them out into the fields. There they beat them, robbed them, hung them from a tree, burned their feet, held a knife to their genitals, and finally cut them loose and told them to run back to Mexico. As the migrants ran towards the border, the Hanigans fired more than one hundred rounds of birdshot into their backs. In Agua Prieta, the Mexican border town just across from Douglas, the migrants went straight to a hospital to have their wounds treated. Doctors reported the incident to Mexican police, who notified the Mexican consul in Douglas. The consul immediately filed charges against George, Thomas, and Patrick Hanigan. Many residents of Arizona border communities defended the Hanigans, rejecting the accusations of torture and claiming that their neighbors had only protected their private |
property. Meanwhile, immigrant rights advocates, Mexican
American civil rights organizations, and government officials in
Mexico and the United States decried the incident as evidence of
the mistreatment of Mexican migrants in the United States.
Between 1976 and 1981, the Hanigans were tried three times.
George Hanigan died of a heart attack before the first trial but
an all-white jury acquitted his sons of torture. Prosecutors argued that the ranchers violated the civil rights of Mexican workers. But the court argued that “illegal aliens” had no rights to violate. When the jury delivered its verdict, the Mexican consul in Douglas famously said the decision “opened the hunting season for every illegal alien who comes into the United States.” On appeal, a second trial unfolded in 1979 and 1980 at a federal court in Tucson. Picketers marched outside the courthouse and threats of rioting spread across the city. When the jury announced that it could not reach a verdict, thereby acquitting the Hanigans for a second time, U.S. prosecutor Mike Hawkins observed that the decision had a “chilling effect” on race relations in the border region. The Department of Justice quickly announced its plan to prosecute the Hanigans again. The third trial was held in Phoenix because U.S. District Judge Richard Bilby, noting the “deep, bitter divisions within the community,” believed that Tucson would not be neutral. The jury this time found Patrick Hanigan guilty, but acquitted Thomas Hanigan for a third time. Many saw Patrick Hanigan’s sentence to only three years in prison as shamefully merciful given the severity of his crimes, but most aggravating was that it took three trials to achieve even partial justice. In a final ironic twist, only a few weeks after the jury acquitted Thomas Hanigan, Arizona authorities charged him with |
possessing and transporting 574 pounds of marijuana. Hanigan
supporters had cited rampant drug smuggling by Mexicans to
support their arguments for tighter border enforcement. It must
have unsettled them that Thomas Hanigan committed such a
crime himself.
Like SB 1070, the Hanigan Case played out against a backdrop of
a national debate on immigration. Since the early 1970s, U.S.
legislators had contemplated comprehensive immigration
reform. In 1972, as the centerpiece of a reform proposal that
failed to gain approval in Congress, Democrat Peter Rodino of
New Jersey suggested sanctions against employers who
knowingly hired undocumented migrants. Five years later,
President Carter proposed his Alien Adjustment and
Employment Act of 1977. Carter incorporated Rodino’s
employer sanctions into his bill, which also increased the size of
the border patrol while offering amnesty provisions that
proposed to adjust the citizenship status of millions of migrants.
Critics on the left opposed employer sanctions, believing they would lead to discrimination against Mexican American workers. Critics on the right would not tolerate amnesty for migrants who had broken U.S. laws. With opposition coming from both sides, Congress defeated Carter’s plan. It took nine more years for legislators to pass the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), a mildly revised version of earlier plans that also included employer sanctions, increased border enforcement, and amnesty provisions. While politicians have lobbied for comprehensive immigration reform at several moments during the past quarter century, IRCA remains the last comprehensive overhaul. During the 1970s, like today, rising numbers of undocumented migrants and economic insecurity prompted calls for immigration reform. The population of Mexican migrants |
increased steadily after the end of the Bracero Program in 1964;
the Immigration Act of 1965; and the establishment in 1965 of
the Border Industrialization Program (BIP). By the mid-1980s,
the BIP had constructed more than 1,000 maquiladoras
between Tijuana and Matamoros and lured hundreds of
companies and more than 300,000 Mexican workers—80 to 90
percent of them women—to cities along the U.S.-Mexico border.
With almost one hundred factories in Nogales and Agua Prieta alone, Sonora became one of the largest maquiladora sites. Despite their long hours and sometimes violently exploitative work environment, maquiladoras enticed hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers to the border. From there, many entered the United States in search of work. Like today, economic downturn made the presence of Mexican migrants within U.S. borders particularly controversial. During the 1970s, the culprits were national worries about stagflation and decreasing oil supplies. Two separate peso devaluations by the Mexican government in 1976 cut the peso’s value by 50 percent, causing a rising cost of goods, capital flight, and increased import costs. These effects hampered the economies of U.S. border cities as well. Many Mexican consumers could no longer afford to shop in the United States. As a Nogales department store owner put it, Mexican shoppers were “in no buying mood.” Americans contending with the downturn were in no welcoming mood. Discrimination and violence against Mexicans and Mexican Americans escalated, leading to episodes like the Hanigan Case. Today, SB 1070 represents another discriminatory displacement of economic crisis not only onto Mexican migrants, but onto all individuals of Mexican descent as well.
Southern Arizona became the location of widespread
|
persecution in the 1970s. Burglaries there prompted accusations
that all Mexican migrants were thieves. The Hanigans’ defense,
in fact, rested on their argument that they detained the migrants
because, earlier that summer, they caught them stealing pistols
from their ranch house. As if to support the Hanigans,
newspapers published articles suggesting the inherent
criminality of Mexicans. The Douglas sheriff himself said, “Most
of our problems have come from Mexico.” Ariz. Governor Jan
Brewer recently made similarly defenseless claims, arguing that
a “majority” of Mexican migrants are drug smugglers.
Threats of violence against Mexicans—if not actual violence— characterized the Arizona border region of the 1970s, as they do today. Men and women wielded guns and vowed to use them to defend themselves and their property. The KKK seized the moment to bring their campaigns of exclusion to the Arizona border. In the wake of the Hanigan incident, David Duke sent Klan members to patrol the border and hunt for undocumented Mexicans. Such actions during the late 1970s were precursors to the vigilante organizations operating in Arizona today. Civil rights organizations met the violent rhetoric of vigilante organizations with increased demands for migrant rights. The Manzo Area Council and the National Ad Hoc Coalition on the Hanigan Case played particularly prominent roles in bringing public attention to the incident. The Manzo Area Council, an immigrant rights organization based in Tucson, decried acquittal of the Hanigans as “a violent precedent of sanctioned aggression against ... the whole Chicano people in the Southwest.” After the judgment, members organized a boycott of border merchants. One of their signs read, “Boycott! Mexicans Unite! Don’t shop in U.S. border cities until justice is served in the Hanigan Case!” The organization also called for a “bill of rights” for all immigrants, |
regardless of citizenship status, which aimed to protect against
violent acts like those committed by the Hanigans. The
organization’s tactics demonstrated a shift in immigrant rights
advocacy that continues into the present: the persistent claim
that immigrant rights are human rights.
For its part, the National Ad Hoc Coalition on the Hanigan Case —formed in November 1977, just one month after the first trial— brought together several Mexican American civil rights organizations to protest the court’s decision. Started by Antonio Bustamante, a law student originally from Douglas, the coalition spearheaded a letter-writing campaign to state and federal officials, asking them to intervene on behalf of the Mexican workers. Why should we remember the Hanigan Case now, as we consider the future of Arizona’s SB 1070 and comprehensive immigration reform in general? Foremost, Arizona politicians seeking to gain traction with voters in their state, while at the same time broadcasting their message to the nation as a whole, have sought to portray the state of affairs in Arizona as an emergency caused by a crashing wave of undocumented immigrants. But perhaps it is Americans’ general aversion to history, or the myopia of our short-term memory, a condition caused by a deluge of opinions and rapidly shifting news cycles, that has blinded us to how the present situation in Arizona evolved over a period of forty years. The Hanigan Case suggests a whole other set of lessons as well. First, it reminds us that Mexican migrants are more likely to be victims of crimes than perpetrators. Second, it demonstrates the strong correlation between recession and anti-immigrant sentiment. On this point, it should come as no surprise that politicians now seek to divert attention from their own political failures and shortsightedness by blaming Mexicans. Third, the |
Hanigan Case shows that vigilante activism in Arizona is not the
domain of a few extremists who have found a home there only
since Chris Simcox moved to Tombstone. From the KKK to the
Minutemen, exclusionary vigilantes have a rich tradition in
southern Arizona. Finally, Arizona also has an equally
impressive tradition of civil rights activism. Individuals
including Isabel García, Margo Cowan, Guadalupe Castillo, and
John Fife—through their leadership of the Manzo Area Council,
the Sanctuary Movement, No More Deaths, and the Coalición de
Derechos Humanos—have struggled from the 1970s onward to
achieve fair and humane treatment of immigrants.
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