Introduction

In the summer of 2008, Gaudencio Fernandez, a U.S. citizen of Mexican descent, erected a handmade billboard on his own private property at a busy intersection in the “Old Town” district of Manassas, Virginia. Standing twelve feet high and forty feet long, the so-called “Liberty Wall” (fig. 1) proclaimed:

PWC AND MANASSAS CITY THE NATIONAL CAPITAL OF INTOLERANCE EUROPEAN AMERICANS EXTERMINATED MILLIONS OF NATIVE AMERICANS IN ORDER TO STEAL AMERICA, THEY WERE THE FIRST ILLEGAL ALIENS. EUROPEAN AMERICANS HAVE A 500-YEAR HISTORY OF RAPE, THEFT, MURDER, SLAVERY, ARTIFICIAL BORDERS, “JIM CROW” LAWS AND DEPORTATIONS OF NATIVE AMERICANS. SINCE 1866 THE KKK RODE AT NIGHT TO TORTURE, LYNCH AND KILL BLACKS, NATIVE AMERICANS, AND OTHER PEOPLE OF COLOR. TODAY THE ACTIONS OF P.W.C. AND MANASSAS CITY COUNCIL, ARE SIMILAR TO THE COLLABORATION BETWEEN LOCAL GOVERNMENTS AND THE KKK IN THE 1900S. ON 2.25.08. MANASSAS CITY MAYOR DOUGLAS S. WALDRON SAID I AM PROUD THAT FINALLY WE CAME TO AN AGREEMENT WITH P.W.C. TO IMPLEMENT 287g, BECAUSE WE CARE ABOUT OUR COMMUNITY. WHAT COM- MUNITY!? 287g. IS AN AGREEMENT WITH IMMIGRATION AND CUSTOMS ENFORCEMENT TO DETAIN AND QUESTION NATIVE AMERICANS BY POLICE OFFICERS AT THEIR DISCRETION. PWC AND MANASSAS CITY PERSECUTE US WITH OUR OWN TAX DOLLAR$, BECAUSE EUROPEAN AMERICANS WOULD RATHER HAVE A GHOST TOWN THAN LIVE AMONG NATIVE AMERICANS. THEY IGNORE OUR VOICES, THEY IGNORE OUR CIVIL AND CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS, THERE IS NO DEMOCRACY… STOP THE PERSECUTION!!! WE DEMAND EQUALITY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL. WE WILL NOT BE YOUR SLAVES OF THE 21ST CENTURY.

In sixteen lines of conspicuous red, blue, and black lettering, the billboard displayed a public diatribe against the City of Manassas and Prince William County’s joint decision to enact ICE 287(g), a controversial Homeland Security program that gives local police officers sweeping and unprecedented authority to enforce immigration laws—a duty once reserved for federal agents. Comparing his community’s decision to impose ICE 287(g) with shameful periods of local and national history, Fernandez’s message accused local White citizens of unjustly targeting the region’s growing Latino population. Furthermore, the wall framed local White citizens who exploit the cheap labor of unauthorized immigrants as complicit beneficiaries to a contemporary system of human bondage. Occupying the voice of unauthorized Latino immigrants, Fernandez’s visual argument declared, “We will not be your slaves of the 21st Century.”

For many White residents of Manassas—a city where memories of the Confederate South are maintained and promoted through the civic landscape and its public memorials—“the sign” was an offensive eyesore that both exaggerated the nature of the new immigration enforcement policies and desecrated American history. “It’s such a negative thing. It’s like a dark cloud,” Joanne Wunderly, president of the Manassas Old Town Business Association, told the Washington Post. Local resident Lawrence Buchanan expressed stronger sentiments: “You put KKK up there and you bring blood up in my face. Why are you trying to bring that old stuff up again?” For his troubles, Fernandez received anonymous threats of violence; on one occasion, vandals attempted to firebomb the billboard (Miroff). But until its court-ordered destruction in September of 2008, the Liberty Wall attracted extensive coverage from domestic and international media outlets, sparked heated debates over the city’s enactment of ICE 287(g), and stood as an icon and rallying cry for those in favor of a humane approach to documenting and assimilating unauthorized immigrants. In accomplishing these feats, the Liberty Wall constituted a powerful intervention in the ongoing and contentious public debates over immigration and ICE 287(g).

The purpose of this essay is to offer a rhetorical study of Gaudencio Fernandez’s intervention in Manassas so that I might cast the contours of the so-called “immigration debates” into starker relief, bring wider attention to ICE 287(g), and direct those who would advocate on behalf of unauthorized immigrants toward rhetorical possibilities that might have otherwise gone undetected. The first section of this essay explains why those who would publicly defend unauthorized immigrants or oppose policies like ICE 287(g) must operate from a constrained rhetorical position. The second details the origins, scope, and social impacts of ICE 287(g). The third provides a short cultural history of Manassas; here, I discuss how Manassas’ adoption of ICE 287(g) coincides with a centuries-old record of racism and “Othering”—a record that has been obfuscated by local civic landscape and public memorials to heroes of the Confederate South. The fourth examines the rhetoric of Fernandez’s Liberty Wall and the controversy surrounding the wall’s creation and reception, drawing special attention to the theoretical issues regarding visibility politics, material presence, and the diatribe that course through this incident. Finally, the last section offers some judgments about the Liberty Wall’s success and points toward some possible pathways for future interventions in public debates over immigration. My intention is not to address every aspect of the continuing immigration crisis in the United States. Rather, my aim is to amplify certain aspects of the crisis so that we might approach a more effective way to carve into the public sphere a discursive space where unauthorized immigrants can make their own voices heard.

Defending Unauthorized Immigrants: A Constrained Rhetorical Position

Given the contours of contemporary U.S. immigration policies and the debates surrounding them, those who would publicly advocate for the rights of unauthorized Latino immigrants or oppose the spread of ICE 287(g) must operate from a rhetorical position that is constrained by (at least) six major obstacles. First, ICE 287(g) decentralizes federal authority over national immigration law enforcement and distributes it to police departments of any city, county, or state that applies for the program. The fact that this immense power has been parceled out to individual regions as geographically and culturally disparate as Farmers Branch, Texas, Danbury, Connecticut, and Butler County, Ohio, makes mounting an organized national movement against ICE 287(g) extremely difficult; in most instances, ICE 287(g) is recast as a unique local issue, not a national one.

Second, by definition, unauthorized immigrants are not “official” members of the public community. Thus, as political scientists M. V. Hood III and Irwin L. Morris put it: “Living without valid work permits, driver’s licenses, marriage certificates, social security numbers, [unauthorized immigrants] are constantly at risk of discovery and deportation” (11). Moreover, organizations that offer aid and support to unauthorized immigrants often expose themselves to legal prosecution in the courtroom and slander in the media (“Former”; Luning; No More; United). Therefore, it remains nearly impossible to establish within the public sphere a safe and secure position from which unauthorized immigrants can represent themselves and make their own arguments, feelings, and experiences heard and seen.

Third, Americans who publicly support programs like ICE 287(g) tend to cite the impact “illegal aliens” have on our nation’s economic, health, educational, criminal justice, and welfare systems, while Americans who publicly oppose programs like ICE 287(g) tend to cite the impact of our nation’s geopolitical, economic, and immigration policies on unauthorized immigrants and their families back home (Chomsky). In a country where “national interest” trumps “global ethic” in nearly every public deliberation of foreign policy (e.g. war on terrorism, climate change mitigation), it is much harder to ground public arguments in self-reflective criticisms of the nation than it is to shift attention and blame to alleged intruders.

Fourth, as we will see in the case of Manassas, Virginia, true public deliberation over immigration law enforcement can be ignored (or can be presumed to be ignorable) by elected officials who are determined to introduce programs like ICE 287(g) into their communities.

Fifth, American immigration policies emerge from a “strange bedfellow” politics that ruptures familiar partisan alliances. Political scientist Rogers M. Smith writes:

1. Many employers and free market economic conservatives support expansive opportunities for immigration, often in alliance with pro-immigrant cosmopolitan liberals and ethnic American advocacy groups. Cultural conservatives generally favor restrictive immigration policies, and historically they have often been joined by many unions and others on the Left who have wished to protect American workers from competition with cheap immigrant labor (114).
   

Thus, by default, those who oppose restrictive and oppressive immigration policies like ICE 287(g) paradoxically align themselves with “Corporate America”—the very entity that many pro-immigration groups blame for the world’s ills.

Finally, those who would mount arguments in favor of a more compassionate approach to immigration reform by drawing upon common understandings of the United States’ racist and imperialistic attitudes toward, and military interventions in, Latin America (in general) and Mexico (in particular), would find that common understandings of this history are all but nonexistent in contemporary U.S. culture (Davis 188-93; Loewen 62-7; Schoultz). In his classic book, Language is Sermonic, rhetorical theorist Richard M. Weaver argues that “rhetoric depends upon history”:

1. All questions that are susceptible to rhetorical treatment arise out of history, and it is to history that the rhetorician turns for his means of persuasion […] Dialectic is abstract reasoning upon the basis of propositions; rhetoric is the relation of the terms of these to the existential world in which facts are regarded with sympathy and are treated with that kind of historical understanding and appreciation which lie outside the dialectical process (161-2).
   

Therefore, to extend Weaver’s thought, collective understandings of the past (and, by implication, the past’s influence upon the present) should serve as principal inventional resources for interlocutors participating in deliberations over crucial public matters. Unfortunately, common experience teaches us that relatively few Americans share collective understandings of the turbulent history of U.S.-Latin America relations, which includes such pivotal events as the Texas Revolution; the United States’ violent and dubious acquisition of Northern Mexico; the American establishment of and control over the Panama Canal; twentieth century U.S. military interventions in Mexico, Panama, Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Uruguay, Chile, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Venezuela; and the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994. It is safe to say that even fewer Americans comprehend the devastating effects that these events have had on politics, economics, culture, industry, agriculture, social stability, and democratic movements throughout Latin America—or how those effects have given millions of Latinos little choice but to seek a better life on the other side of the Mexico-U.S. border. Not unlike the brutal history of the genocide of Native Americans, the history of U.S. policy toward Latin America is all but absent in everyday American consciousness. Therefore, in light of Weaver’s comments, this troubled history stands as a particularly deficient inventional resource for pro-immigration advocates.

Despite this constrained rhetorical position, pro-immigration advocates must continue to search for possibilities of resistance against the spread of ICE 287(g). In fact, they must do so with more urgency, given the Obama administration’s recent expansion of the program (Hsu). Even as greater numbers of communities around the nation adopt ICE 287(g), an estimated 450,000 unauthorized immigrants continue to risk their lives by crossing the barren deserts of the Southwest to enter the United States each year (Passel and Cohn 29). While unauthorized immigration rates remain steady, the intensified militarization of the Mexico-U.S. border near urbanized areas has pushed migration toward sparsely populated sectors where immigrants are less likely to be detected; raised immigrants’ dependence upon dubious “coyotes” (border smugglers); increased the physical risks and death rates associated with border crossing; and lowered the probability that unauthorized Latino immigrants—who are loath to experience the gauntlet of border crossing again—will ever return home on their own volition (Massey 134-7).

Unlikely to return home, yet living and working without the rights and protections afforded authorized immigrants, the growing population of unauthorized Latino immigrants finds itself increasingly targeted by overreaching policies like ICE 287(g), which routinely lead to deportation and the break up of families. Unable to turn to law enforcement officials in times of need, many unauthorized immigrants live in a constant climate of fear and oppression. As the Southern Poverty Law Center states:

1. They are routinely cheated out of their earnings and denied basic health and safety protections. They are regularly subjected to racial profiling and harassment by law enforcement. They are victimized by criminals who know they are reluctant to report attacks […] This treatment […] is encouraged by politicians and media figures who scapegoat immigrants and spread false propaganda. And as a result of relentless vilification in the media, Latinos are targeted for harassment by racist extremist groups, some of which are directly descended from the old guardians of white supremacy (4).
   

It is little wonder that the vast majority of Latinos residing in the United States believe that their situation is deteriorating (Pew).

The Evolution of ICE 287(g)

ICE 287(g) refers to an amendment that was written into Section 287 of the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. Inserted into legislation that already gave Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) officers sweeping powers to pursue, interrogate, arrest, “remove,” and use “deadly force” against “aliens” or suspected “aliens,” 287(g) allowed the Attorney General to shift authority once solely reserved for INS agents to local police officers across the nation:

1. The Attorney General may enter into a written agreement with a State, or any political subdivision of a State, pursuant to which an officer or employee of the State or subdivision, who is determined by the Attorney General to be qualified to perform a function of an immigration officer in relation to the investigation, apprehension, or detention of aliens in the United States (including the transportation of such aliens across State lines to detention centers), may carry out such function at the expense of the State or political subdivision and to the extent consistent with State and local law (563).
   

Quietly slipped into a bill that is 750 pages long, this short provision represented a seismic shift in the federal government’s conception of how and where the United States would combat “illegal immigration.” As criminal justice policy analysts Aarti Shahani and Judith Greene note, 287(g) “for the first time in US history created a formal mechanism for federal executives to extend to local agencies the extraordinary arrest and incarceration powers originally carved out for immigration police stationed at the borders. This devolution—shifting immigration enforcement from federal to local hands—[brought] the border to the interior of our nation” (7). Disturbingly, even as it parcels out federal powers to local police departments, the ambiguous language of 287(g) classifies participating police officers as neither local agents nor federal agents, but rather as something in between. The law states that each participating police officer is “subject to the direction and supervision of the Attorney General” and acts “under color of Federal authority,” yet “shall not be treated as a Federal employee” except in the case of a lawsuit (563-4). Thus, similar to police forces in authoritarian regimes, American police officers operating “under the color” of this “Federal authority” occupy a murky liminal space from which to exercise highly concentrated and centralized powers at the community level.

Despite its potential appeal to leaders in communities near the Mexico-U.S. border, no city, county, or state sought a 287(g) agreement with the federal government during the Clinton years. But following the events of September 11, 2001, the Department of Justice turned its attention to 287(g) and explored its utility in the so-called “war on terror.” On April 3, 2002, Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee—author of the infamous “Torture Memo”—wrote an internal memorandum advising Attorney General John D. Ashcroft that all police officers in the United States have an “inherent authority” to arrest and detain unauthorized immigrants. Whereas the 1996 bill had vaguely defined the federal powers that local police departments could seek and obtain through 287(g), Bybee’s memorandum explicitly declared that all U.S. police officers have always held the inherent (if undeclared) power of “arresting aliens on the basis of civil deportability.” Citing sections of the First Amendment concerning states’ rights, Bybee’s opinion officially refuted and overturned the Department of Justice’s longstanding position that local police are not allowed to enforce most immigrations laws. Furthermore, it essentially transformed what had been strictly a civil matter—unauthorized immigration—into a criminal one (Bybee; Shahani and Greene 9). On February 28, 2003, just days before the United States’ invasion of Iraq, President George W. Bush formally dissolved the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and transferred its investigative and enforcement functions to U.S. Immigration and Enforcement (ICE), a newly-formed Department of Homeland Security agency. 287(g) was quickly assigned to the purview of ICE, and on July 2, 2002, ICE entered into the first ever 287(g) agreement with the state of Florida, where local police officers were “given the ability to enforce immigration laws in cases involving terrorism and national security” (“Florida”).

Since the 2002 Florida agreement, the police departments of at least sixty-seven “political subdivisions”—including the entire states of Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Missouri, and Tennessee—have entered into 287(g) agreements with ICE. Scrutiny of these agreements, however, shows that most were not signed until 2007 and 2008, long after the “anti-terrorism” fervor of the immediate post-9/11 years (U.S.). The dates of these agreements coincide, instead, with the political controversies surrounding the 2006 United States immigration reform protests, which saw millions of people, including unauthorized immigrants, take to the streets in opposition to proposed anti-immigration legislation. When the right-wing legislation failed in Congress, media figures like Lou Dobbs lambasted the demonstrations, fanned anti-immigration flames, and helped create political space for officials across the nation to pursue ICE 287(g) agreements for their respective communities (ADL 21-26). FBI and census data reveal that 61% of ICE-deputized communities had violent and property crimes rates lower than the national average before seeking a 287(g) agreement. Yet 87% of the same communities had a rate of Latino population growth higher than the national average. These figures indicate that race, not crime, propelled the spread of 287(g) between 2006 and 2008 (Shahani and Greene 2). As one commenter has noted: “ICE’s roster of 287(g) agreements reads like a map to hotspots in the immigration wars, places where activists say relations between immigrants and the larger community are particularly strained” (Ballvé).

Initiated under the pretenses of the “war on terrorism,” but expanded during an anti-immigration crusade, the implementation of ICE 287(g) has contributed to the problematic conflation of the terms “illegal aliens,” “illegal immigration,” “immigrants,” “criminals,” and “terrorism,” to the point where combating terrorism can be easily linked to immigration law enforcement (and vice versa). This integration of terms has been advanced by conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, which claims that ICE 287(g) effectively reduces “the unlawfully present population in the United States” and facilitates “domestic counterterrorism operations” (Carafano). This rhetorical and ideological conflation has become so mainstream that we can find it on reputable and supposedly non-partisan television news programs like 60 Minutes. For example, in a January 10, 2010, segment titled, “Watching the Border,” 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft stated: “One thing we've learned over the years is that the smugglers and terrorists and illegal immigrants can be quite imaginative in ways to subvert the system.” Such offhanded, implicit equations between unauthorized immigrants, criminals, and terrorists make it all the more difficult to view unauthorized immigration as anything other than a national security issue that must be handled with aggressive force and pursuit.

It remains unclear whether ICE 287(g) has in any way been directly responsible for preventing terrorism against the United States. On its official website, Immigration and Customs Enforcement maintains that 287(g) is vital to combating “terrorism” and rooting out “foreign-born criminals and immigration violators who pose a threat to national security.” Yet the agency offers scant evidence to support this claim. Instead, ICE’s website prominently touts the “fact” that 287(g) has been “credited for identifying more than 70,000 (since January 2006) individuals […] who are suspected of being in the country illegally” (U.S.). In its own words, then, ICE admits that 287(g)’s primary function is to identify human beings who are suspected of being in the United States without authorization. Indeed, in 2006, ICE discreetly eliminated an internal requirement that 75% of those arrested under 287(g) be criminals (Bernstein). Thus, over time, 287(g) has morphed into an excessive and haphazardly applied weapon against what we might call “instances of suspected trespassing upon American soil”—this despite the fact that current Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has asserted that such trespassing is a civil matter, not a criminal one (Napolitano). Sadly, as a recent Department of Homeland Security report shows, the vast majority of individuals detained under ICE 287(g) and transported to the twenty-two ICE Immigration Detention Facilities across the U.S. are never charged with a criminal offense (Schriro 13).

There is little clarity concerning ICE 287(g)’s purpose, effectiveness, and constitutional limits. Unfortunately, this lack of clarity has, in effect, given participating police officers carte blanche to target immigrant communities with abandon and little oversight. Over the past few years, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the U.S. Government Accountability Office have published reports detailing the many abuses ICE-deputized police have committed against Latino immigrants. These transgressions include racial profiling, excessive police checkpoints in immigrant neighborhoods, the illegal seizure of unauthorized immigrants’ assets, and a general dehumanization of Latino immigrants. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Latinos in ICE 287(g) communities tend to live in fear that the most minor infraction might result in the destruction of families. This collective fear is not unfounded: statistics out of Nashville reveal that 80% of the 3,000 individuals deported in the first year of the city’s ICE 287(g) program were arrested on misdemeanor offenses; 25% were detained on charges of driving without a license (an offense often committed by unauthorized immigrants who cannot obtain legal documentation to lawfully drive). One Nashville immigration lawyer has described the local situation thusly: “It is open season on Hispanics in Nashville now.” The city’s approach to combating unauthorized immigration has shattered the Latino community’s trust in Nashville police officers; in a recent survey, 73% of Latinos living in Nashville said they are more reluctant to cooperate with the police because of ICE 287(g). Unwilling to approach the police to report crimes, unauthorized immigrants living in ICE 287(g) locales like Nashville have become prime victims of armed robbery (thieves dub them “walking ATMs”), sexual assault, and exploitation at work (employers can withhold unauthorized immigrants’ wages with little fear of sanction). “ICE is killing us little by little,” says Leticia Alvarez, a pro-immigration activist in Tennessee. “People are now afraid to leave their homes and go in the street” (20-30).

It is this flawed program that Manassas, Virginia, embraced in the spring of 2008.

A Cultural History of Manassas, Virginia

The City of Manassas is located in Prince William County, Virginia, just thirty miles from Washington, D.C. It is considered part of Northern Virginia—one of the wealthiest regions in the nation. Until the mid-twentieth century, this part of the country was rural, farming territory. But over the last fifty years, Northern Virginia has transformed into a mega-“bedroom suburb” of the nation’s capital (Manassas Museum). Home to 2.5 million people, Northern Virginia features two major international airports; the Pentagon; the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency; the offices of transnational corporations, financial firms, and military industry companies; and a number of political think tanks and reputable universities. Today, six counties in Northern Virginia, including Prince William, are among the top twenty highest-income counties by median household income in the United States (Woolsey).

The region’s recent economic boom has been fueled, at least in part, by an influx of Latinos—both authorized and unauthorized—who, over the past few decades, have provided cheap labor in service industries, agriculture, landscaping, and residential, commercial, and road construction. U.S. Census data shows that in 1990, only 9,662 Latinos lived in Prince William County, comprising just 4.5% of the county’s population. But by 2008, over 68,000 Latinos lived in the county, representing 19% of the local population. Manassas City has been impacted by this influx of Latinos more than most cities in the county; according to recent U.S. Census data, roughly 10,000 Latinos live in Manassas, making up 28% of the community (see online U.S. Census Bureau data). In combination with a rapidly expanding unauthorized population (as of 2008, between 275,000 and 325,000 unauthorized Latino immigrants lived in Virginia), these demographic shifts have brought racial tensions in the region to a boiling point (Passel and Cohn ii).

Like many cities in the United States, Manassas has a turbulent racial history that mirrors that of the nation. Before European invasion, indigenous peoples, including the Doeg Tribe, occupied modern-day Manassas and the surrounding region for over 12,000 years. Following England’s establishment of the Virginia Colony, the Jamestown Settlement, and the Williamsburg Settlement in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the well-known process of European invasion and territorial expansionism led to the demise of local indigenous populations and the rise of a brutal African-slave-based agricultural economy. In 1860, Virginia had more African slaves than any other U.S. state, and one out of every four White families in Virginia owned slaves. By the outbreak of the American Civil War, the economy of the Manassas region was sustained by a number of slave plantations—including the Liberia, Sudley, and Leo plantations—which produced grains, vegetables, and tobacco (“Virginia”).

During the Civil War, Manassas served as the battleground for two key Confederate victories, the First and Second Battles of Bull Run—a historical fact that dominates contemporary local public memory. After the Union Army’s siege of Richmond, General Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, and the abolition of slavery, White citizens of Virginia developed and vigilantly maintained a strict social order that treated peoples of color as (at best) second-class citizens and (at worst) subhuman beings. As historian Jane Dailey tells us, African Americans in postbellum Virginia were systematically “stripped of political power through poll taxes, literacy tests, and Democratic electoral fraud and violence.” Jim Crow segregation, racial purity laws, and White lynch mobs helped maintain the White population’s dominance over African-Americans and other minority groups for a century (5-6).

This racist social structure was also codified through legislation. For example, in 1924, John Powell, a White supremacist and the founder of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs, convinced the Virginia House of Delegates to pass two closely related eugenics laws, the Racial Integrity Act and the Sterilization Act. The Racial Integrity Act made interracial marriage a felony and required that a racial description be recorded at the birth of every Virginian. Each newborn was to be characterized as either “white,” “colored,” “mulatto,” or “mixed” so that her or his place in the state’s racial hierarchy could be fixed. The act stipulated that even “one drop” of non-Caucasian blood rendered a baby as something other than “white.” Furthermore, Virginia’s Indians were to be listed as “colored,” which, in historian J. Douglas Smith’s words, helped “define the state’s Indians out of existence.” Meanwhile, the Sterilization Act authorized the involuntary sterilization of any Virginian whom medical authorities deemed “insane, idiotic, imbecile, feeble-minded or epileptic.” Guided by law and the eugenicist teachings of University of Virginia medical professor Ivey Foreman Lewis, Virginia doctors sterilized thousands of mostly poor Whites, Blacks, and Indians for decades (76-106). Championed by local White supremacist groups that sought a Nazi-like purification of the White race, these two shameful pieces of legislation remained on the state’s books until the 1970s. On February 3, 2001, the Virginia House of Delegates passed a belated resolution expressing “its profound regret” for the 1924 laws, though, as the Washington Post reported, not without opposition:

1. Even today's resolution was changed to remove the word “apology.” Some House members, including Del. Harry J. Parrish (R-Manassas), wanted to go further and remove the passage expressing regret, though he called the resolution's intentions admirable. “We're offering regrets for something that was done legally,” Parrish said. “It's improper for us to now second-guess the General Assembly then” (Timberg).
   

Sadly, the flagrant racism embodied by the 1924 Acts has not dissipated over time. Rather, it has appeared again and again (if in different or subtler forms) throughout recent state and local history. For instance, in 1981, the Virginia House of Delegates reacted to new federal bilingual education mandates (designed to help Spanish speakers) by passing the first “Official English law” of modern times—nativistic legislation that ceremoniously enshrined the status of English as the state’s official language (Linton 18; Tatalovich 19-20). In 1982, the Manassas School Board paid Tim Donley, a former assistant principal at Manassas Park High School, $10,000 to settle a racial discrimination charge; Donley, who is White, had been told by school officials not to publicize his recent marriage to an African-American woman, nor to bring her to campus (Melton 81). In 1996, Stonewall Jackson High School officials angered African-American residents of Manassas by hiring Matt Ondrof, a White baseball coach who had been fired from his previous job for letting his players draw a Ku Klux Klan symbol in the infield dirt as a good-luck charm during games (Wee). In 2004, Manassas City Council implemented a Residential Overcrowding Code Enforcement Program that purportedly aimed at “overcrowding,” but that actually was meant to reduce the Latino population of Manassas. City inspectors disproportionately targeted Latinos, as 92% of all the homes investigated under this discriminatory program were Latino-owned or occupied. Furthermore, city inspectors intimidated Latino families by having police officers present and conducting nighttime inspections—actions that were never taken against non-Latino residents. In 2007, a group of Latino residents successfully sued the city for violating their civil rights and settled out of court (Equal; Washington). In 2009, the Washington Post reported that six Stonewall Jackson High School students had been suspended for using “pieces of landscaping sod to form a swastika and spell out ‘KKK’ and ‘white power’ in a parking lot at Sinclair Elementary School in the Manassas area” (Brown). And in 2010, Democratic Governor Bob McDonnell declared that April would be Confederate History Month in Virginia. Reviving a controversial practice initiated in 1997 by George Allen (of “Macaca” fame) so that he might appeal to “conservative” voters, McDonnell called for Virginians to “understand the sacrifices of the Confederate leaders, soldiers and citizens during the period of the Civil War.” When the Washington Post asked McDonnell why his proclamation made no mention of slavery, he answered, “[T]here were any number of aspects to that conflict between the states. Obviously, it involved slavery. It involved other issues. But I focused on the ones I thought were most significant for Virginia” (Kumar and Helderman). These few incidents, chosen from many, point to the incessant racism that continues to plague everyday life in Manassas and Virginia as a whole.

As Northern Virginia has transformed into a more culturally and demographically diverse region, the City of Manassas (much like Governor McDonnell) has tried to reinvigorate, privilege, and whitewash memories of Old Dixie and postbellum Southern life. Most notably, over the last decade, Manassas has refurbished its “Old Town” district, a manicured neighborhood cordoned off from the gas stations, strip malls, billboard advertisements, and condominium complexes that have come to dominate much of Northern Virginia’s landscape. This massive project has involved the preservation of historic buildings and the erection of new structures that signify a romanticized local past in which genteel Southerners tipped their hats and curtsied to each other as they walked to and from the general store. The sentiments of this civic project are perhaps best expressed by the official website for Old Town Manassas (Commonwealth), which states:

1. Come explore Historic Old Town Manassas, Virginia. Always an unforgettable destination; quaint shops, museums, and galleries await you amidst the charm of century-old facades […] The southern tradition of hospitality lives on in Manassas, evidenced in the greetings you receive as you walk down the streets or step into the shops. No matter your pleasure, business or history, art or antiques, you will find the perfect memory to take away with you!
   

The Old Town project resembles similar efforts across the country (e.g. Boston’s Quincy market, New York’s South Street Seaport, and Pittsburgh’s Homestead area) in which, to paraphrase cultural theorist Douglas Rushkoff, developers and local officials exploit historic authenticity for effective theme marketing and stimulate in visitors an unconscious desire to incorporate the values of a fictive past into their own daily life through purchases (76-7). In Old Town Manassas, the discrimination and racial terror so central to postbellum Virginian life have been discarded in favor of commercialized appeals to the “charm” of Southern hospitality.

The Old Town district stands just five miles from another, but perhaps more authentic, site of memory: the Manassas National Battlefield Park. Managed by the National Park Service, this site shares certain qualities with other Civil War parks. Here, U.S. Park Rangers conduct educational lectures and tours that cater to middle school and high school students. The visitors’ center contains a bookstore, a museum (dedicated to Civil War era artifacts), and a movie theater where visitors can watch the park’s “orientation film,” End of Innocence (a battle reenactment film narrated by Richard Dreyfuss). Outside, itinerant visitors can walk along acres of rolling hills that once served as battlefields, observe original cannons, fortifications, and buildings, and wander among small stone markers dedicated to fallen soldiers of both the North and South. Despite the anachronistic intersection of major auto routes Lee Highway and Sudley Road (fig. 2)—an apt symbol of the relentless suburbanization of Northern Virginia—visitors can begin to imagine what Northern Virginia must have looked like a century and a half ago.

What differentiates Manassas National Battlefield Park from other Civil War parks is its blatant and unapologetic celebration of the Confederate Army. Whereas Gettysburg National Military Park (for instance) was originally designed to serve as a site of national reconciliation—a space where visitors and veterans from both the North and South could gather to honor the 51,000 soldiers killed there—Manassas National Battlefield Park offers a memorial landscape that overtly emphasizes Southern heroism and victimization while downplaying the accomplishments and suffering of the Union Army (Explore; Weeks 35). The most prominent object in the park is the larger-than-life statue of General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, a patron saint of Southern heritage (fig. 3). Cast in bronze, Jackson sits astride a horse, flexing his exaggerated and rippling muscles beneath his Confederate uniform. Below the statue reads, “THERE STANDS JACKSON LIKE A STONE WALL,” a reference to the mythic courage shown by Jackson’s Virginia brigade during the First Battle of Manassas. A few hundred yards away stands the Henry House, the home of the Civil War’s first civilian casualty, Judith Carter Henry (fig. 4). Itinerant visitors learn that when the First Battle of Manassas erupted around her house, the bedridden octogenarian was unable to flee for safety. Subsequently, she was killed in her bed by Union gunfire. While standing before her tombstone in her own backyard, it is easy to think of Henry as an innocent martyr to Northern aggression.

The themes of Southern bravery and sacrifice displayed in the Jackson memorial, the Henry House, and other park monuments conveniently elide the thorny subject of African slavery and its crucial relation to the American Civil War. In Manassas National Battlefield Park, the fact of slavery is addressed only by the orientation film (The End of Innocence) and two informational panels located in a poorly lit room in the visitors’ center. The film and the panels avoid any specific mention of the historical reality of the local region’s slavery system; furthermore, they offer no commentary about the horror and brutality of slavery in the United States at large. Sidestepping moral judgments of the past, the film and the informational panels cast slavery as a benign cultural institution that the Confederacy was determined to defend in the name of states’ rights (Heard). This framing of slavery as an issue of states’ rights completes (what appears to be) the park’s unstated mission to justify Southern secession, glorify Confederate militarism, and romanticize antebellum life in the South.

Manassas National Battlefield Park’s veneration of Old Dixie reverberates through the City of Manassas, which has incorporated the park’s narrative of the past into its everyday landscape and social institutions. In Manassas, the streets are named for Confederate heroes (the Old Town District is surrounded by Lee Avenue, Douglas Street, Jefferson Street, Mosby Street, Stonewall Road, Longstreet Drive, and Bragg Lane). In Manassas, teenagers attend Stonewall Jackson High School, golfers play at Stonewall Golf Club, and wine connoisseurs sip Riesling at Gray Ghost Vineyards (which, according to its website, celebrates the memory of the “Gray Ghosts of the Confederacy”). In Manassas, the Signal Hill Monument pays homage to “AMERICA’S CONFEDERATE SIGNAL VETERANS, THE FIRST TO RAISE IN BATTLE ‘THE BONNIE WHITE FLAG THAT BEARS THE CRIMSON SQUARE,’” and the Confederate Cemetery displays the gravestones of “THE HEROES OF VIRGINIA AND HER SISTER STATES WHO YIELDED THEIR LIVES […] IN DEFENSE OF THE CONFEDERATE CAUSE.” In Manassas, a powerful rhetorical project continues to promote visions of White, Southern heroism, while the accomplishments, contributions, and tribulations of peoples of color remain ignored.

The Liberty Wall: Visibility Politics, Material Presence, and the Diatribe

On February 25, 2008, the City Council of Manassas held its weekly public meeting at City Hall. By most appearances, the forum proceeded like any other: Mayor Douglas S. Waldron called the meeting to order, offered a prayer to the Lord, and led those present in the Pledge of Allegiance to the United States; the City Attorney gave updates on a series of municipal legal matters; and Council Members discussed and voted on various banal bureaucratic motions, including a resolution to purchase a microfilm reader and a street sweeper for the city. Things took a sharp turn, however, when the Council reached “Item 17” of the night’s agenda: “Consideration of Memorandum of Agreement Between United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the City of Manassas Police Department and Authorize the Mayor to Sign.” Deputy Chief of Police Don McKinnon came forth and reported that on February 13, 2008, he and the Council had held a private “work session” to review a proposed 287(g) agreement between Manassas and ICE. McKinnon explained that the 287(g) agreement would extend federal immigration enforcement authority to “select police officers and detectives,” who would “coordinate all criminal alien enforcement initiatives” between various police task forces and the Prince William-Manassas Adult Detention Center. While McKinnon cautioned that the 287(g) agreement would require increased funding for the Police Department and the Adult Detention Center, he urged the Council to authorize the Chief of Police to sign the 287(g) ICE Memorandum of Agreement on behalf of the City of Manassas. After a few words of thanks from the Mayor, the Council Members unanimously voted to approve the 287(g) agreement and authorize the Chief of Police to sign it—an act that surely was prearranged in a closed-door “work session.” With little public deliberation, and without any mention of why the city would want to adopt such a policy in the first place, the Council opened the Pandora’s box that is ICE 287(g). Following this quick vote, the Council returned to comparatively trite matters, designating March both Multiple Sclerosis Awareness Month and Irish History Month.

After a short recess, the Council reconvened for “Citizens’ Time,” the period in every meeting when local residents can address the Council and the Mayor directly. Because the night’s agenda had been published in a local newspaper, a handful of citizens were prepared to comment on the ICE 287(g) agreement. Limited to three minutes of speaking time each, ten citizens took the opportunity to express their thoughts on the matter. Dave Core thanked the Council “for trying to clean up the City with the adoption of the ICE agreement,” and believed that “even the smallest crimes are still crimes.” Nancy Lyall opposed the city’s decision and found it “sad that the Memorandum of Agreement was voted on before Citizens’ Time.” Tom Phillips commended the Council “for taking proactive efforts for safe environments for citizens [sic],” and Harry Clark felt that the ICE agreement was an “appropriate use of tax dollars to remove predators.” Rev. Stuart Schadt noted that some of the language in the ICE agreement “gave him chills,” while John Steinbach argued that unauthorized immigrants “are just hard-working people who need jobs.” Gaudencio Fernandez (the protagonist of this essay) approached the microphone and condemned the Council’s decision, stating that he had moved to Manassas six and a half years before because he had liked the area and had felt it was “a safe town to raise a family.” But in light of the ICE agreement, he was no longer sure this was the case (Manassas).

The First Amendment guarantees U.S. citizens the freedom of speech. But nothing in the Constitution guarantees the right to be heard.[1] As the proceedings above show, Citizens’ Time came after the Council’s “consideration of” the ICE 287(g) agreement. Though eventually given a chance to express themselves, Manassas citizens were denied the opportunity to engage the Council in true deliberation or to be heard in a way that might sway the minds of city officials at the last minute. The deed was done before any citizen could speak. The possibility of verbal persuasion had been neatly taken off the table. Following that meeting, Fernandez must have felt frustrated by his inability to sway the minds of city officials, yet determined to discover an effective way to intervene on behalf of the Latino community.

The principal challenge Fernandez faced was finding a way to establish for Latino unauthorized immigrants an authentic and effective presence within the local political milieu. His onerous task struck at the heart of “visibility politics,” defined by communication scholar Dan Brouwer as

1. theory and practice which assume that “being seen” and “being heard” are beneficial and often crucial for individuals or a group to gain greater social, political, cultural or economic legitimacy, power, authority, or access to resources. With this understanding, individuals and collectives which call for their greater visibility might create or demand more (or different) fictive or non-fictive texts about themselves, more (or better) visual images of themselves in public media, or more (and better) physical presence in public spaces. Visibility politics move individuals and collectives out and away from the shadows and margins […] into the light of public spaces (208).
   

Communication scholars widely acknowledge the importance of visibility politics in modern social movements and protests in the United States. As Carole Blair and Neil Michel argue, the “material presence and visibility” of African Americans at marches and sit-ins throughout the South “was the crucial element” of the Civil Rights Movement, for the visual contrast between “neatly-dressed, polite African American demonstrators” and “their often brutish, white supremacist opponents […] reversed historically accreted, stereotypical images of African and European Americans” and effectively cast African Americans as moral agents of change (142). While visibility can have its risks and strategic invisibility can have its rewards, visibility politics holds that the concrete and visible presence of human bodies—when applied correctly—is often a powerful means for shaping public perceptions of the group in question. The material display of the bodies reveals the group’s humanity in a way that cannot be easily denied.

An ICE 287(g) agreement enforces a peculiar invisibility upon unauthorized immigrants. When a community forges a 287(g) agreement with ICE, it becomes impossible for local unauthorized immigrants to demonstrate publicly without exposing themselves to severe persecution, for 287(g) is specifically designed to facilitate the identification, detainment, and deportation of so-called “aliens.” In other words, while an ICE 287(g) agreement embodies the formal recognition of the presence of an unwanted group of people (in this case, unauthorized Latino immigrants) within a given space (the city limits of Manassas), it simultaneously forces the group to become less visible, vocal, and present within that very same space. In essence, an ICE 287(g) agreement strips from unauthorized immigrants any previously held abilities or entitlements to exist physically—to be—within a particular territory. How, then, can unauthorized immigrants—people who speak little or no English, who lack the rights afforded U.S. citizens and authorized immigrants, whose very existence marks them for arrest—emerge from the community’s penumbra to present and defend themselves openly?

Given the reality that verbal persuasion and the visible display of unauthorized Latino immigrants’ bodies were not viable means of protest and opposition, Fernandez decided to use his construction and carpentry skills to erect a large, physical, wooden sign on his own private property that might both communicate an intense dissatisfaction with the city’s ICE 287(g) agreement and establish the presence of the disembodied Latinos. With the help of his sons, relatives, and friends, Fernandez built the sign at 9500 Liberty Street (hence the name “Liberty Wall”), a small but prominent strip of land that is adjacent to the local Amtrak station, the Old Town district, and the Harris Pavilion (the site of a weekly farmers’ market). By the time he finished writing his polemic in red, blue, and black paint, Fernandez had created an eye-catching monument of sorts that dominated the field of vision of this crucial civic space.

Verbal persuasion and the visible display of human bodies are ephemeral in that they can be sustained for only a given period of time. At some point, the voice becomes hoarse, the forum for debate ends, or the protest permit runs out. Material objects like public memorials, billboards, and buildings, however, are inherently endowed with a presence that is far more permanent in space and time. Thus, as anyone who has commissioned a memorial to Confederate soldiers of the Civil War (for example) understands, material objects can be excellent vessels for transmitting sustained visual arguments within a given space. The fundamental power of such objects lies in the fact that, outside of acts of vandalism, their messages cannot be outright suppressed. Communication scholar Thomas W. Benson’s insights to the nature of visual rhetoric speak to this point:

1. Visual rhetoric in all its forms appears to be more or less exempt from the implicit     standard of verbal rhetoric that all argument, in principle if not in practice, is subject to the ethical expectations of reciprocity—all parties are owed an equal chance to speak—and of bilaterality—if we commit ourselves to an argument, we owe our interlocutors the fair chance to win us and our audiences over to their point of view. Visual rhetoric, for the most part, does not work that way (414).
   

As Benson indicates, visual rhetoric often entails a monologue of sorts—an unequal, one-way, ‘sender-receiver’ form of communication in which the opportunity to rebut is not realized. The advantages of this asymmetrical exchange for the sender (the person or group responsible for the visual argument) are obvious and become magnified many times over when the visual argument is delivered through an immovable material object like the Liberty Wall (as opposed to a fleeting medium like television). The materiality of Gaudencio Fernandez’s sign established a static presence that could not be denied by any person traversing this busy civic space. Commanding the attention of skilled workers commuting to and from D.C. on Amtrak trains, citizens attending the upscale farmer’s market, and shoppers walking through Old Town Manassas, the Liberty Wall seemed to say, “This sign will always be louder than your various ‘presences.’”

If local residents in favor of the ICE 287(g) agreement felt challenged by the form and material presence of the Liberty Wall (which, in relation to the civic architecture and public memorials of the area, should have seemed incongruous and profane), they must have been downright traumatized by the content of Fernandez’s written message. As if delivered by the singular, collective voice of the entire unauthorized Latino immigrant population of Manassas, the incendiary message bluntly indicted local White residents for abetting a massive social injustice. In essence, this message was a diatribe.

Communication scholar Theodore Otto Windt, Jr. characterizes the diatribe as the “last resort for protest,” a rhetorical form that “gathers an audience when orthodox speeches will not.” Developed by Diogenes and the Cynics, those famous moral philosophers and social outcasts who publicly criticized the hypocrisies and excesses of Hellenistic Greece, the diatribe is a verbal attack against some person, institution, or common practice or belief. Its purpose is to gather attention and rearrange an audience’s perceptions by “dramatizing the chasm that exists between ideals and practices, between language and actions, between illusions and actualities” in society. Rather than seeking identification with an audience through traditional appeals to reason, emotion, and character, the diatribe assails “basic societal values to which conventional speakers would customarily appeal.” Violating rules of decorum with unbridled language, slang, anecdotes, character-sketches, dialogues against imaginary opponents, and other unusual symbolic acts, the diatribe “is moral dramaturgy intended to assault sensibilities, to turn thought upside-down, to turn social mores inside-out, to commit in language the very same barbarisms one condemns in society.” Offering a “counter-morality,” the diatribe “attempts to reduce conventional beliefs to the ridiculous, thereby making those who support orthodoxy seem contemptible, hypocritical or stupid.” Most significantly, this distinctive rhetorical form

1. is intended to illuminate and to purge corruption when other methods fail. It is the rhetoric and lifestyle of the outsider who finds himself alienated from civic life and who discovers a morality, an extremely romantic morality, in personal experience to replace that founded on tradition. He opposes the compartmentalization of life into neat pigeonholes that allows man to act one way on one occasion and a contradictory way on another (1-9).
   

As recent diatribes by Amiri Baraka, Ward Churchill, and Rev. Jeremiah Wright have shown, the diatribe can entail great personal risk for the speaker. Much like Michel Foucault’s “parrhesiastes”—the courageous speaker who lashes out against tyranny because he “prefers himself as a truth-teller rather than as a living being who is false to himself”—the diatribist exposes herself or himself to the wrath of the public and those in power precisely because she or he sets out to shock, not to win over, the audience (Fearless 17). But, as Windt tells us, the diatribist is willing to risk all because she or he knows that “[p]eople seldom become concerned about problems until they are shocked”—that shock and moral dramaturgy foster attention, and that attention is a prerequisite to communal discourse and action (8).

Fernandez’s text was, as Windt puts it, “moral dramaturgy intended to assault sensibilities.” A “direct verbal attack” against a litany of “imaginary opponents” (including Manassas City Council, Mayor Waldron, ICE, and many generations of European Americans), the text exposed and dramatized the “chasm” that exists between local residents’ ideals (“care” for the “community”) and practices (the “persecution” of Latino neighbors)—between illusions of the past (Southern heroism, nobility, and charm) and documented, yet intentionally neglected, actualities (“a 500-year history of rape, theft, murder, slavery, artificial borders…”). Exercising the rights of a propertied U.S. citizen, Fernandez simultaneously occupied not only the subject position of the entire Latino community of Manassas, but also the respective subject positions of a long line of groups despoiled over the centuries by European Americans. Counteracting the region’s ceaseless reanimation of the “Gray Ghosts of the Confederacy,” Fernandez revived and mobilized the spirits of bygone Native Americans, Black slaves, and African Americans in order to rearrange and violate the White community’s sense of self. Displaying a diachronic archive of atrocities committed in that very locale, Fernandez appropriated the past and subverted White residents’ claims to a higher (and historically rooted) moral ground. Unable to mount a legal challenge in court or an oratorical challenge in City Hall, Fernandez instead turned to the public diatribe—the “last resort for protest”—and effectively staged a moral challenge to the corrupt, racist, and anti-democratic forces shaping local society, culture, and experience. Most importantly, Fernandez deployed the words “we,” “us,” and “our”—terms previously used by local Whites to exclude unwanted minorities—in such a way as to reconstitute their semantic content and establish (by semiotic proxy) the defiant presence of unauthorized Latino immigrants.

Like a modern-day Diogenes, Fernandez shocked the members of his target audience to the core, drew their immediate attention to a discomfiting “counter-morality,” and created social friction when and where it was not wanted (but desperately needed). From its inception, the Liberty Wall evoked a flood of local opinion-editorials and messages to Manassas officials urging the city to remove the sign. Charles Reichley of InsideNoVa.com (an online newspaper that covers Northern Virginia affairs) advocated the wall’s demolition, claiming: “The Liberty property represents hope for illegal immigrants, sending the message that borders mean nothing, that people can’t be illegal, that each person has a right to live where they want without regard to laws” (Reichley).[2] Many local residents expressed even stronger sentiments on InsideNoVa.com message boards. “There’s nothing gasoline and a lit match can’t fix,” one commenter threatened. “Who’s with me?” Another person, under the pseudonym “Go Away,” wrote in bold letters: “TEAR DOWN THE WALL. TEAR DOWN THE WALL. TEAR DOWN THE WALL” (Hanley, “Second”). Black Velvet Bruce Li, a rightwing blog dedicated to Manassas politics, attacked Fernandez directly, branding him as a “naïve,” “ignorant,” and “deranged” “Zapatista” (“Anarchists”). Put on the defensive, but unable to counter the Liberty Wall through argumentation, residents who supported the ICE 287(g) agreement ultimately attempted to silence Fernandez’s message by destroying the medium. In time, city officials cited Fernandez for violating a building code, claiming that he had reinforced the Liberty Wall with a wooden base without applying for a necessary permit. The city also charged him with using the site as a junkyard and providing a “habitat for undesirable wildlife,” including rats and snakes. "If anyone can build anything they want where they want, then we don't have a building code," City Manager Lawrence Hughes claimed. "We've balanced the issue of free speech with the need to enforce the building code." Fernandez, however, saw these accusations as a ploy to silence him, so he refused to dismantle the sign (Miroff). Taken to court, Fernandez exhausted a series of countermotions and appeals until September of 2008, when he consented to remove the sign. The Liberty Wall’s razing brought much joy to Fernandez’s opponents. The editors at InsideNoVa.com smugly declared: “Liberty Street is clean” (“And”). Weeks later, City Manager Hughes would tell the press: “When the sign was removed, I believe there was considerable relief among residents, businesses and commuters” (Hanley, “Top”; Kiser).

But the victory Fernandez’s opponents celebrated was only partial, at best. In the months between its creation and demolition, the Liberty Wall successfully garnered local, national, and international media attention, and placed the city’s ICE 287(g) agreement under intense (and, for many local Whites, undesired) public scrutiny. As if holding up a mirror to the local community, the billboard and its flagrant textual diatribe urged Manassas residents to reconsider their virtues, actions, and history. Traumatized by this call for self-reflection, the residents lashed out at Fernandez instead. Their fierce resistance, however, symbolized not only recognition of Fernandez’s actions, but also an implicit acknowledgement of the presence and voices of local unauthorized Latino immigrants. Furthermore, the city’s backlash only served to amplify the Liberty Wall’s message. In July of 2008, the Washington Post caught wind of the city’s suit against Fernandez and published a major article on the controversy. Soon thereafter, reporters from local television stations and international Spanish-speaking networks descended upon Manassas, connecting Fernandez’s efforts to the national immigration debates (fig. 5; “Immigration”).

Chockfull of vivid, racially-charged one-liners, the Liberty Wall satisfied the cravings of the sound bite oriented press and quickly became a ‘media darling’ of sorts. This expanding attention, in turn, validated the Liberty Wall and endowed Fernandez’s property with greater social significance. 9500 Liberty Street became a gathering space not only for Fernandez’s opponents (who yelled at him and his family from the street), but for pro-immigrant grassroots organizations like Mexicanos Sin Fronteras and Mexica Movement as well (Miroff; “Immigration”). A group of independent filmmakers arrived and shot extensive footage of the unfolding saga for their subsequent, award-winning documentary film 9500 Liberty. On April 20, 2010, CNN commentator Rick Sanchez interviewed the film’s director, Eric Byler, who described and endorsed Fernandez’s actions. Thus, twenty months after the Liberty Wall’s physical destruction, the billboard’s message continued to resonate and impact public discourse on the still unresolved issue of immigration.

Conclusion

The purpose of this essay was to offer a rhetorical study of Gaudencio Fernandez’s fight for justice in Manassas so that I might cast the contours of the so-called “immigration debates” into starker relief, direct greater attention to the spread of ICE 287(g), and point those who would advocate on behalf of unauthorized immigrants toward rhetorical possibilities that might have otherwise gone undetected. I began by explaining why those who would publicly defend unauthorized immigrants or oppose repressive policies like ICE 287(g) must operate from a constrained rhetorical position. Next, I described the evolution of ICE 287(g) from a misguided statute into a central component of the United States’ post-9/11 “wars” on “terrorism” and “illegal immigration.” I then provided a brief cultural history of Manassas, Virginia, focusing on the region’s turbulent racial politics, incessant racism, and glorification of the Confederate South. Finally, I offered an account of both Manassas’ adoption of ICE 287(g) and Gaudencio Fernandez’s creation of the Liberty Wall. Here, I argued that the Liberty Wall constituted a material diatribe—the physical manifestation of a verbal attack designed to shock the people of Manassas. Eliciting outrage from the community, the Liberty Wall drew wider public attention to the city’s actions and effectively established the defiant, if virtual, presence of local unauthorized Latino immigrants. In accomplishing these feats, the Liberty Wall stood as a powerful and successful intervention in the ongoing and contentious public debates over immigration.

In closing, I would like to advance the idea that those who would fight for the rights and humanity of immigrants in communities that have adopted ICE 287(g) agreements can learn at least three lessons from this story. The first lesson is that immovable material objects placed in important civic spaces can be effective vessels for sustained symbolic action and the representation of those whose bodily presence has been forcibly suppressed. The second lesson is that the diatribe—the “last resort for protest”—can be used both to contextualize local current events within a deeper local history and draw wider (or even national and international) attention to what has been designed to remain within local consciousness and geographical boundaries. The final lesson is that it takes courageous citizens who possess and choose to exercise their freedom of speech to challenge ICE 287(g) and defend those whose rights and humanity have been denied by the law.

Footnotes

1 I thank Professor John Poulakos for this insight.

2 In typical fashion, these comments ignored the Liberty Wall’s argument that “European Americans” were “the first illegal aliens.”

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