From Civil Rights to Human Rights: The Origins of the Immigrant Rights Movement

This paper exposes growing domestic and international battles over the rights of undocumented immigrants in the United States at the dawn of the human rights revolution. The 1970s witnessed a wave of violent crimes against undocumented immigrants across the US South and Southwest. In Arizona, a family of ranchers kidnapped and tortured a group of young farmworkers. In Southern California, Border Patrol agents led a vigilante group responsible for beating undocumented immigrants; while in Louisiana, a farmer kept undocumented farm hands chained, in an attempt to extract forced labor. These crimes outraged the international community, which demanded that the Carter administration live up to its promise to protect human rights. Beginning with the Arizona case in 1976, Mexican American civil rights joined religious organizations, US congress members, and Mexican politicians in the pursuit of of justice for undocumented immigrants. Together, this coalition transformed the application of human rights in the United States. This paper examines how these processes unfolded, and contributes to the scholarship on human rights as it was experienced in contested borderlands and Sunbelt legal regimes. It brings together international press coverage, largely unused archival sources from the groups at the heart of this story – including the US federal government, civil rights organizations, and the Catholic Church – as well as interviews with the victims conducted in the months following the crimes. By focusing on these crimes and the grassroots movements they inspired, this paper reveals how immigrant rights activists shifted their focus from obtaining civil rights to human rights as a means of securing justice for undocumented immigrants.