Latinos in Israel: Language and Unexpected Citizenship 0253036496, 9780253036490

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Note on Transcription
Introduction: Language and the Unexpected Citizen
Chapter 1. Becoming Noncitizens: Modernizing Agency in Latino Arrivals in Israel
Chapter 2. Strangers in Their Own Home: Educación, Domesticity, and Transnational Intimacy
Chapter 3. Inculcating Citizenship: Language, Performance, and the Commensuration of Cultural Difference
Chapter 4. Chisme as Latino Public Life: La Alcachofa and Marginal Public Voices
Chapter 5. El Sapo Speaks: Police Informers and the Voice of the State
Chapter 6. Becoming Israeli Citizens: Latino Youth, Uncanny Similarity, and the Message of Citizenship
Epilogue: The Unexpected Citizen as Voice of Response
References
Index

Citation preview

L AT I NO S i n I SR A E L

PU BL IC C U LT U R E S OF T H E M I DDL E E A S T A N D N ORT H A F R IC A Paul A. Silverstein, Susan Slyomovics, and Ted Swedenburg, editors

L AT I NO S in ISR A E L Language and Unexpected Citizenship

Alejandro I. Paz

Indiana University Press

This book is a publication of Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA iupress.indiana.edu © 2018 by Alejandro I. Paz All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. Manufactured in the United States of America Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-0-253-03649-0 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-253-03650-6 (paperback) ISBN 978-0-253-03651-3 (ebook) 1 2 3 4 5  23 22 21 20 19 18

To the light of my heavens, Tamouz Andrea and Nour Peter

Contents

Preface Acknowledgments Note on Transcription

ix xiii xvii

Introduction: Language and the Unexpected Citizen 1 1 Becoming Noncitizens: Modernizing Agency in Latino Arrivals in Israel 30 2 Strangers in Their Own Home: Educación, Domesticity, and Transnational Intimacy 56 3 Inculcating Citizenship: Language, Performance, and the Commensuration of Cultural Difference 83 4 Chisme as Latino Public Life: La Alcachofa and Marginal Public Voices 111 5 El Sapo Speaks: Police Informers and the Voice of the State 136 6 Becoming Israeli Citizens: Latino Youth, Uncanny Similarity, and the Message of Citizenship 161 Epilogue: The Unexpected Citizen as Voice of Response 194 References 201 Index 221

Preface This book came to me unexpectedly. I set out to study ethnolinguistic issues

among Latinos in Israel, and to especially focus on how Latinos understood themselves as different from Israelis. When I arrived, however, Latinos wanted to talk about their similarities to Israelis. Since I did the majority of my fieldwork (2004–2006) after a period of intensified deportation sweeps, as well as the beginning of a campaign for citizenship, Latinos felt their differences but also realized that similarity could get them closer to the economic stability they needed. The dissertation that I wrote from my fieldwork tended to maintain the resulting tension. It was only in the process of transforming my dissertation into a book that I realized that the Latinos’ interest in citizenship was also to be found in the way they understood their differences. Looking back at my fieldwork, I realize that as an ethnographer I ended up playing a role in the complex circuits by which Latinos came to engage in the cultural politics of Israel, and also in forming their claims to citizenship. As for so many before me, the fieldwork sent me in unexpected directions. I  initially became interested in Latino unauthorized immigrants as a research assistant for a sociological study in the late 1990s. I worked first with two Latino Evangelical churches, who made—to my eyes—extraordinarily Zionist claims to explain their presence in Israel, which included prayer and ritual that incorporated Hebrew-language formulations. For the most part, these Evangelicals took me—a Hebrew-speaking Jew—for an Israeli native. My fieldwork thus somewhat reversed the classic ethnographic fieldwork encounter. On other occasions, many Latinos assumed that—as a native Spanish speaker with a Spanish name and a Latin American background—I was not very different from them. All this piqued my curiosity, and I sought to study the linguistic and discursive aspects of how Latinos were being transformed in Israel. But it was some time before I returned to begin ethnographic and linguistic fieldwork, in September 2004, two years after the establishment of the Immigration Authority and the onset of mass deportations. Many Latinos either had been deported or had left out of fear of deportation. Others had dispersed to the suburban areas of Tel Aviv, which made their lives more difficult, but helped them avoid detection. Many of the people whom I had known prior to starting my doctoral studies were no longer there, or they lived with a sense of siege, in much smaller networks of kin and friends.

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x | Preface These changes shaped all my fieldwork, and my position in the field. I began to assume the kinds of intermediary roles that I describe in this book. I helped frame the voice of Latinos to Israeli audiences, and then helped relay information to Latinos. For example, I had planned to work with a Latino organization, La Escuelita, which instructs children in standard Spanish and Latin American public culture. I had hoped to volunteer as an assistant, to see how children were instructed in Spanish and culture, and how Israeli language and culture came to be compared. When I arrived in September 2004, however, two of the teachers had just been arrested and awaited deportation, and a third had decided to stop working with La Escuelita in order to save up money before the police caught him. La Escuelita suddenly needed many teachers, and its charismatic director immediately pressed me into service. While previously many undocumented Latinos had been teachers at La Escuelita, suddenly most were Jewish Spanishspeakers and long-term residents. As a group, we represented the citizens who were helping to provide services to marginalized youth and Latino families. At the same time I became a teacher, a series of contingencies also led to my becoming an NGO advocate. One of La Escuelita’s teachers who had been arrested received a judgment that gave her thirty days to organize her affairs before leaving the country. She only needed someone to help her post bail, which involved a bit of bureaucratic running around. At the first meeting I attended for La Escuelita’s teachers, the question of help was discussed, and everyone explained why they could not do it. Even though it was my first meeting, I realized that I was being called upon to help. In some ways, the crisis of deportations seemed to change the time it takes to create trust and reciprocity. To get instructions on how to post bail for the arrested teacher, I was sent to an NGO, at the time known as the Hotline for Migrant Workers. The Hotline was very active on labor migration issues, and as I wondered how I would carry out my fieldwork, I began to volunteer there too. It was there that I became involved in the campaign for citizenship for the children of labor migrants. This campaign, as I describe throughout the book, was hugely important and formative for the Latinos during the majority of my fieldwork. In fact, the campaign enabled me to see the deep web of relations between language, cultural politics, and citizenship. If I had come to do a study about bilingualism and transnationalism, one that emphasized how Latinos maintained boundaries of difference, I had arrived at exactly the right time to see how Latinos were more interested in emphasizing their similarity to Israelis. Further, La Escuelita and the Hotline, and other organizations with which I worked, were all involved in the campaign. These organizations worked on forging a public message to the Israeli public, and I began to see how important that process was to Latinos. Eventually, I did manage to do the kind of research I had set out to do. I started to record conversations of Latino families in order to get a sense of how

Preface | xi they used Hebrew and Spanish, and more importantly how they managed to inhabit different voices in their discursive interactions. I also interviewed Latinos about their reasons for migration and their routes to Israel. Here, the issue of educación, and the voices of the strict Latin American parent (chap. 2), came to the fore, which I quickly realized engulfed the perceived difference between Hebrew and Spanish. Ultimately, this fieldwork helped me see the deep relations between, on the one hand, the campaign and the various forms of publicness in Latino lives, and on the other hand, Latinos’ attunement to the politics of language and culture. The study that I had set out to do, and the unexpected one that was forced upon me when the Immigration Authority began its mass deportations, connected. That is the final meaning of the unexpected in this book: that my own fieldwork was shaped by and helped to shape how some Latinos became unexpected citizens in Israel. Throughout, I use pseudonyms to protect those who shared with me important aspects of their lives and work. Further, in an effort to keep the discussion as accessible as possible, some of the more technical points are fleshed out in footnotes.

Acknowledgments A book is a kind of discursive transformation, rotating on an axis of debt.

I must start by acknowledging the excellent education I received as a graduate student. Susan Gal and Michael Silverstein are both inspirational and dedicated mentors, and I cannot find a way to thank them enough. I received a great deal also from Amy Dahlstrom, Victor Friedman, Claudio Lomnitz, Beth Povinelli, and Michel-Rolph Trouillot (who is sorely missed). And of course from Anne Chi’en. Thank you all, both for your example and your patience. I am grateful also to my classmates, who always pushed me both by example and critique, especially Chris Ball, Sue Chlebove, Courtney Handman, Shunsuke Nozawa, Ben Smith, and James Slotta. I am lucky to have added fantastic interlocutors after grad school, whose sage advice I wish I were better able to implement. Big thank yous to Hilary Parsons Dick and Rihan Yeh for reading repeated drafts and their smart critiques. And to Paul Manning and Anne Meneley for speed-reading everything toward the end, for great mentorship, and for never letting me lose hope. Frank Cody, Jessica Greenberg, and Rebecca Stein were able to refocus ideas into a book, and are always in my corner. My SWAGgers, Sarah Hillewaert, Katie Kilroy-Marac, and Krista Maxwell, provided strength when it was lagging. Sarah also helped me get some of these chapters to the finish line. Thanks also to Vinita Joseph for writing advice. At the University of Toronto, I found a terrific home, and a large group of people to challenge and inspire me. I thank the Department of Anthropology for accepting me with open arms, and in particular Sandra Bamford, Janice Boddy, Girish Daswani, and Michael Lambek. Monica Heller has been a generous critic and mentor, always ready to listen. Including those I have already mentioned, my colleagues have taught and advised me about much through the years. I could not have written this book without you, and many conversations with you stuck with me as I wrote. I wish I could do justice to your contributions individually: Joshua Barker, Dan Bender, Katherine Blouin, Bianca Dahl, Naisargi Dave, Chandler Davis, Natalie Zemon Davis, Maggie Cummings, Drew Gilbert, Atiqa Hachimi, Jens Hanssen, Mark Hunter, Jennifer Jackson (we miss you), Bea Jauregui, Ivan Kalmar, Chris Krupa, Katie Larson, Richard Lee, Tania Li, Hy Van Luong, Ken MacDonald, Bonnie McElhinny, Amira Mittermaier, Lena Mortensen, Andrea Muehlebach, Valentina Napolitano, Kevin O’Neill, Ato Quayson, Bhavani Raman, Shiho Satsuka, Larry Sawchuk, Jo Sharma, Gavin Smith, Michael

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xiv | Acknowledgments Schillaci, Jack Sidnell, Mary Silcox, Jesook Song, Ed Swenson, Holly Wardlow, and Donna Young. It has truly been an honor to work alongside you all. My students at the University of Toronto, both undergraduate and graduate, have taught me a great deal, and I’m grateful to them for sharing their ideas and experiences. Undergraduate students in particular have shown me how to make highfalutin scholarship work for them (I hope my writing shows this!). Thanks also to Laura Murillo for excellent research assistance. I have also learned much from everything graduate students bring to conversations. In particular, I feel fortunate to be working with Omri Grinberg, Hannah Mayne, Marianna Reis, and Dima Saad. Thank you all for being so smart! Over the years, I have also been lucky to discuss my work and ideas with numerous other colleagues and friends, who have challenged me. I owe an enormous debt to Dafna Hirsch and Bonnie Urciuoli for pushing this book in all the right directions. So many others have also helped with encouraging critique and stimulating ideas. I’m unable to mention everyone, but I’d like to thank Rabie Abu-Latifa, Asif Agha, Yehonatan Alsheh, Gadi Algazi, Amahl Bishara, Jillian Cavanaugh, Patrick Eisenlohr, Jasmin Habib, Yaqub Hilal, Barak Kalir, Adriana Kemp, Bruce Mannheim, Rosina Márquez Reiter, Luisa Martín Rojo, Norma Mendoza Denton, Galey Modan, Dan Monterescu, Rob Moore, Rebeca Raijman, Jonathan Rosa, Shalini Shankar, Smadi Sharon, Housni Shehadeh, Nitzan Shoshan, Sarah Willen, Kristina Wirtz, and Fiona Wright. You all made me think more and differently. My research was enabled by wonderful people who taught me a lot about citizenship in Israel and what it means not to have it. So many helped me along the way, and I know you will forgive me for not mentioning everyone, but I would like to thank especially Nena Aristizábal, Jorge Iván Henao Melo, Oded Feller, Angélica Garces, Luís González, Shevy Korzen, Romm Lewkowicz, Michal Pinchuk, Sigal Rozen, Emi Saar, and Willán Zhapa. I hope your lessons show through in what follows. The team at Indiana University Press has been exceptional, proving that publishing can be a good experience. I thank the editors of the series, Paul Silverstein, Susan Slyomovics, and Ted Swedenberg, as well as the Editorial Director at IUP, Dee Mortensen, for your enormous enthusiasm from the beginning. The rest of the staff, including Darja Malcolm-Clarke and Paige Rasmussen, have all been wonderful to work with. Special thanks to Anita Hueftle for the excellent copyediting. My pre-field studies were funded by a Canadian Scholarship Trust Fund Graduate Award, a Phoenix Fellowship from the University of Chicago, and a Doctoral Fellowship from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. My field research was generously supported by the Fulbright-Hays Program (Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad), the Wenner-Gren Foundation (Dissertation Fieldwork Grant), and the National Science Foundation (Doctoral

Acknowledgments | xv Dissertation Research Improvement Grants). As a graduate student, my writing was moved along with funding from the Schusterman Fund for Israel Studies. At the University of Toronto Scarborough, I was supported by a New Faculty Research Grant. I am very grateful for the enormous financial support provided by all these agencies. Despite these many debts, responsibility for the text is mine alone. You all tried your best! Parts of chapter 4 appeared in a different form previously in the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 19(1) 2009. My family has been unbelievably patient and supportive. My parents, Myriam and Peter Bayerthal, must wonder how their own intergenerational strategy worked out! To my older siblings, thanks for always looking out for me: Fanny Paz-Prizant and Mircea Rotenberg, Benjamin and Sylvia Paz. And of course, the next gen: Tanya, Aaron, Claudia, Colin, Ilan, and Roni. Natalie’s family in Israel has also been a constant source of support and strength, with much love; thanks to Hilla Havkin, Zamir Havkin, Rachel Rinat, Rami Rudich, and of course to the elo’ima and elosavta, Hannah Rothman. We still miss you, Dod Mike. I love you all very very much. Tamouz and Nour put up with a lot of absent daddy, even sometimes present in person and not in thought. Thanks for your patience and for never accepting that daddy needs to work instead of playing. But how does one describe the biggest debt of all? To my perfect and beautiful partner in all things, Natalie Rothman: how many times did you have to respond to my “I must be stupid” and “why am I so slow?” I may be slow and stupid, but, thanks to you, I have published a book.

Note on Transcription Where possible, I have used common spellings for Hebrew words. Otherwise,

I use symbols that are easily read in English. One difference is that the [x] represents a sound like the “ch” sound at the end of the German pronunciation of “Bach.” -y is used in diphthongs like [ay], pronounced as in “I,” and [ey], pronounced as in “bay.” I also use an apostrophe to signal vowel hiatus (e.g., yisra’el). I generally transcribe the standard register that is commonly used, rather than the forms that are taken as “correct” (e.g., where /k/ is supposed to be pronounced [x], but usually isn’t). The historical distinction still marked in Hebrew script between the glottal stop (alef) and the voiced pharyngeal approximant (ayin) is not relevant to most of the Hebrew represented in this book, and therefore I have not distinguished the two. Where necessary, I differentiate between Spanish and Hebrew utterances or terms through the use of font: Spanish is in italics, while Hebrew is in small caps. Where the difference has been neutralized, I use both. In other places, either the context is clear to distinguish Spanish and Hebrew in quotations, or I specify this explicitly. In those places, no change is made to the font. I sometimes provide the original language transcription in a note using the appropriate font for interested readers.

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L AT I NO S i n I SR A E L

Introduction Language and the Unexpected Citizen

I

n November 2005, several dozen teenagers filled a courtroom at the Israeli Supreme Court in Jerusalem, along with supportive school administrators and nongovernmental organization (NGO) advocates, to participate in a hearing on a petition that challenged a government Resolution from the previous June. At stake was the right of most of those teenagers, children of unauthorized immigrants— non-Jewish “foreign workers” (ovdim zarim) as most Israelis call them—to stave off deportation. At stake also was the opportunity to become citizens. The state attorney, Yochi Genessin, was there to argue against the challenge. She put on a dramatic performance, intimating, as she had many times before, that giving citizenship to teenagers like those in the audience would pose a demographic threat. This demographic argument, made by Zionist leaders continuously since the British rule of Mandate Palestine (roughly 1918–1948), has come to index Israeli anxieties about the number of Palestinians that live under Israeli rule, and especially about the number of Palestinian citizens. In this demographic reasoning, the claim that the Israeli state is both Jewish and democratic means the population must be overwhelmingly Jewish. While Genessin spoke, a sixteen-year-old from Ecuador, Noga, visibly upset, asked me when she would have a chance to explain how she felt. In that Supreme Court setting—one of the paradigmatic places to act as a citizen, to be addressed and to address others as citizens—Noga was moved to respond. I told her that I did not know that she would get that opportunity. I was also a little surprised because I knew that Noga was loathe to appear publicly. She had arrived from Ecuador six years earlier and lived in a suburb, far from the concentration of unauthorized immigrants in south Tel Aviv. None of her school friends knew that she and her family lived without legal residence. Noga guarded this secret carefully, even using an Israeli name that had been bestowed upon her in school shortly after her arrival. But I also knew that she could be a compelling speaker, displaying Israeli national personhood with ease. NGO advocates were always looking for teenagers who could make the case for citizenship in media interviews. Noga did find her chance to respond. During a break in the proceedings, people clustered outside the courtroom in small groups. I suddenly heard an impassioned voice rise above the others. Turning, I saw Noga had cornered

2  |  Latinos in Israel one of Genessin’s assistants, and she was giving him a piece of her mind—in fluent Hebrew, of course. She told the assistant attorney that she was finishing grade 11 and had just returned from a two-week preparatory Israeli military camp (called the Youth Battalions, gadna), where she had received a prize for excellence. She continued: at the camp, Noga was told she would be able to enter one of the prestigious combat units, if she wanted, upon formal conscription. In Israel, nothing is considered a greater sign of loyalty to the state than the desire to serve in its military forces. Later, Noga repeated most of this speech in an interview with a newspaper (see chap. 6). Even as she said all this, Noga knew that as a noncitizen—as una ilegal, as Latinos in Israel often put it—she would not be able to join her friends going to the military after high school. Her secret would be discovered. Genessin’s assistant, clearly taken aback, answered simply, “congratulations.” How else could he answer? Noga had only been in Israel six years, arriving at the age of ten. Like most Latinos, she lived in precarious circumstances. Deportation always hung over her head and that of her family. A state-sponsored publicity campaign criminalized “illegal” foreign workers as damaging the Israeli economy (see chap. 5). Yet is it not uncanny how quickly she had become fully committed to the Israeli state project? Her declaration to the assistant attorney, measured off in flawless Hebrew, displayed Noga’s loyalty to the state. Genessin herself heard the whole exchange, but, while everyone else within earshot had turned to look, she stiffened and gazed indignantly away. A prominent state attorney, Genessin had not expected such an outburst from a noncitizen sixteen-year-old. Especially not from only a few feet away, and in the language of the state Genessin seeks to keep Jewish. Israelis might, with a bit of embarrassed pride, recognize the chutzpah of Noga’s behavior. Genessin’s indignant, stiffened posture signaled her refusal to recognize Noga’s response, and also gave away that she could not help but hear it. Genessin and her team were unexpectedly confronted by a kind of person who challenged their nationalist assumptions about who should be excluded from citizenship, and who could be included in public deliberations. This book examines the unexpected ways that noncitizen immigrants respond to their exclusion, and how their responses across a variety of contexts must be taken into account to understand their claims to citizenship. More than that: this book charts how the very words and circuits of communication that mediate and shape those responses—the multiple kinds of semiotic form, including the language they speak—suggest to noncitizens that they have claims  to citizenship. I discuss how the ability to respond forms in relation to countless engagements with Israelis, in ordinary and everyday occasions just as much as in the most highly ritualized and public moments, like at the Israeli Supreme Court. As bureaucrats and politicians like Yochi Genessin sought to exclude,

Introduction | 3 criminalize, and racialize them as ilegales (shabaxim in Hebrew), Latinos and other unauthorized immigrants did not simply remain “in the shadows.”1 Unauthorized immigrants, marginalized as they are, do not need to directly confront the Yochi Genessins of the world, as Noga did, in order to hear them, and in order to formulate a response. In multiple ways, through multiple settings, they engage Israelis—both those who condemn them as well as those who support them—and they generate responses about cultural similarities and differences, and how they can belong: ultimately, this process needs to be taken into account in order to understand the emergence of claims to citizenship. Most often, Latinos’ responses adopted something from Israeli voices, something strange that became familiar, and produced various degrees of uncanny similarity to the ways Israelis communicate—uncanny as much to Israelis as to Latinos themselves. In this book, I show how the voices of Israelis and Latinos reflect and refract throughout the lives of these noncitizens, producing in them the sense that they could make claims to belonging in Israel. In doing so, I am arguing that the politics of immigration, citizenship, and deportation cannot be understood without accounting for the contradictory and conflicted ways that noncitizens come to adopt and adapt interactional practices. To understand their responses, moreover, it is necessary to do away with the assumption that unauthorized immigrants live “in the shadows,” or come “out of the shadows” only when they are finally given a chance to address the political public sphere.2 Such descriptions suggest that marginalized noncitizens are not aware of the public debates over national culture and language engendered by migration. As I show, from the moment of their arrival, Latinos cannot help but find themselves overwhelmed by the cultural politics of nation and immigration. Even in their own homes, Latinos find the cultural politics of Israel playing out discursively. There are no shadows for them to hide. Rather, there are powerful shapers of public opinion and law, like Genessin, who will not turn to face them and recognize their claims. Latinos find themselves transformed by responding to Israelis: their partial and conflicted adoption of Israeli interactional practices, like speaking Hebrew or speaking with directness (or even with chutzpah), is part and parcel of this response. They start to sound like Israelis as they respond to them and as they acquire de facto substantive rights, and these discursive and interdiscursive practices condition their eventual formal public claims to citizenship. That is why this book examines interactional practices—linguistically and discursively produced voices—across a variety of settings, from the most intimate and domestic to the most public and mediatized. It is in the discursive and interdiscursive tangles of intimacy and publicness that noncitizen claims to belonging are forged. Marginalized and racialized noncitizens like Noga do have effective responses to the powerful regimes that would exclude and deport them.

4  |  Latinos in Israel Sometimes these responses, and the way they are delivered, prove too compelling to ignore. We can learn a great deal by considering how those responses are produced and conditioned by interactions across a variety of obvious and not so obvious settings. We can learn a great deal about citizenship anywhere by looking at the multiple social voices that wend their way through the social worlds of noncitizens and cause them to reflect on their relation to citizens and the state. That is the task of this book.

Approaching Citizenship: The Case of Noncitizen Latinos in Israel There is a classic contradiction in both the study and the practice of modern citizenship: how can an abstract principle of equality—that all citizens are equal members of a political community—function with the many forms of concrete, lived inequality?3 There are many kinds of “differentiated citizenship” around the world, to use James Holston’s (2008) term, with substantive differences in the distribution of rights despite formal equality, and these differences “generate a gradation of rights” among citizens.4 This contradiction is exacerbated by the fact that regimes of citizenship actually include a variety of categories, which are often tied to migration on the one hand and, on the other, to zones of “graduated sovereignty” where labor discipline and rights are differentially enforced (Ong 1999, 21–24; 2006, 75–96). From permanent residents to people on student visas, from seasonal workers to guest workers, from recognized status groups to asylum seekers, citizenship processes always generate distinct categories, which become unevenly institutionalized across state apparatuses. That is, the differentiated legal status across populations, including both citizens and noncitizens, is further accentuated by the graduated sovereignty of territories. These points add up to acknowledging that citizenship is not an either/ or classification, where people either are or are not citizens. Although many bureaucrats and politicians treat citizenship in such an abstract way, struggles around citizenship display all kinds of tensions in the attempt to regularize rights given the vast differences across populations. The common phrase “secondclass citizen,” the way marginalized people or categories are excluded from the benefits  of full citizenship, and social movements’ ability to effect changes all underscore the limits of either/or thinking (Rosaldo 1994a, 402–4; 1994b, 57). Thus, it is important to see the constant tension at the dividing line of citizen and noncitizen, and to ask also what kinds of citizen-like claims are made by those who are not formally recognized as citizens (Vora 2013, 4–6). To be sure, formal state recognition of citizenship does make a difference. For this reason, I will continue to speak of “citizens” and “noncitizens,” while recognizing that sometimes it is only a convenient shorthand.

Introduction | 5 An important strand in the study of citizenship has emphasized the historical processes for working out the tensions between equality and difference, and between inclusion and exclusion. T. H. Marshall (1950) made an early and widely cited contribution to this debate when he suggested that citizenship is not a single bundle of rights that are fully granted to every subject, but rather a process where rights are achieved in stages by groups of different standing. Many have critiqued his liberal premises, but his general point that groups struggle for rights, through which different citizenship statuses emerge, continues to be useful. Marshall’s insights are generally discussed today in terms of a distinction between formal (recognized) rights and substantive rights (those rights that subjects actually can fulfill). Many scholars conclude that the lived reality of inequality means that nothing inherent in citizenship itself, nor in the lofty statements that often accompany its pronouncement, creates equality, but still the promises held out by its institutions and rhetoric can be mobilized to push against inequality. At the same time, governing large populations, especially to provide labor for capitalist projects, has meant producing exceptional zones or statuses that increase inequalities.5 Two important questions arise from these considerations. First is whether there is any site where inequalities can be set aside and citizens can interact as equals. One influential answer to this question posits the public sphere as a potential such site, where (ideally) citizens can address each other as citizens, and, by doing so, take part in government (esp. Arendt 1958; Habermas 1989). Here, the argument goes, the citizen becomes recognizable by inhabiting the impersonal voice of the public sphere, and being recognized as such by other citizens. There are many important critiques of the assumptions about the universality of the public sphere.6 Nonetheless, such work has led to important insights. One important takeaway is that modern citizenship cannot be understood without attending to the interactional practices that constitute publicness, especially how they are mediatized.7 A growing scholarship emphasizes the relation of language and publicness (e.g., Bauman and Briggs 2003; Gal and Woolard 2001b; Inoue 2005). Further, studying publicness from its margins—analyzing its strange intimacy—offers important insights to its very formation (esp. Manning 2012, 14–15). That is why I began with the example of how Noga, as part of a public campaign for citizenship, addressed the state attorneys, hoping to gain recognition and support for her position. In that moment, Noga surprised her addressees with her compelling and passionate Hebrew-language statements, delivered in a form derived from Israeli public discourses and that easily disseminated through the mass media. A second question involves the historical contingencies that induce groups of citizens or noncitizens to push back against their exclusion. Differentiated citizenship is an unstable process of creating distinctions in status, geographically

6  |  Latinos in Israel and across populations—often due to the fluctuating priorities of state officials and business managers. Yet groups of citizens or noncitizens can intervene in these processes and redefine through their collective actions the terms of inclusion and exclusion. Given the current conjuncture of migrant and capital flows, many have turned to the study of the city to give examples of such “insurgent citizenship” (to quote again Holston 2008).8 Here, on the other hand, I emphasize language and interactional practices as producing the conditions for a claim to citizenship among noncitizens. The campaign for citizenship itself is made possible by addressing Israeli publics, as analyzed in chapter 6. Yet it is not possible to understand the success of the campaign, nor how Latinos came to see their potential to claim citizenship, I argue, without considering other points. First, it is necessary to examine the transformations Latinos underwent, and how they conceived of those transformations, as they arrived in Israel and learned to respond to Israelis in multiple contexts. Such transformations affected even the most intimate, domestic interactions between parents and children. Second, it is necessary to address the multiple other types of publicness Latinos could inhabit, and what kinds of limits or opportunities these afforded for participating publicly like a citizen. These considerations come up across the book. When thinking about noncitizens, like the Latinos described in this book, we can ask, as I do in chapter 1, at what point do they begin to accrue substantive rights (see esp. Holston and Appadurai 1999, 4)? Is it at the moment that they first pass through border control and enter the country? When they get their first job in Israel and rent their first apartment? When they enroll their children in an Israeli school, or receive health care? What happens when some turn into police informers (sapos), as I discuss in chapter 5, and thus gain a limited capacity to remain in Israel and continue working? Do sapos, under the limited protection—and limited recognition?— of their police handler, count as a distinct citizenship status? Do families with children like Noga, who between 2003 and 2011 could not be deported, count as a distinct citizen status? Such achievements do not sound anything like citizenship in the abstract, ideal sense of the bureaucrat, and certainly Latinos’ deportability means that all such achievements remained fundamentally revocable. Yet at the same time, the eventual full recognition of hundreds of Latinos and other unauthorized immigrants as citizens of Israel began with such smaller moments of accruing substantive rights. And here is the crux of the issue, and the reason to consider carefully how noncitizens like Noga become capable of publicly making claims to citizenship. These moments of accruing substantive rights are accompanied and made possible by a discursive transformation. In each moment, Latinos are being transformed by their engagement with, response to, and partial—and ambivalent—adoption of, Israeli interactional practices. Further, if in many modern polities, claims

Introduction | 7 to citizenship often work through addressing a mass-mediated public, then the ways that Israeli publicness is constituted for Latinos, and the way Israeli publicness is recursively produced in more private spheres (Gal 2002), requires attention. I therefore consider the production of public claims a vital aspect of understanding how modern citizenship works and creates distinct statuses. That means I place a greater emphasis than most on the mediating role of publicness and its repercussions throughout multiple contexts: citizenship today cannot be understood without considering how public opinion is tied interdiscursively to many contexts throughout social life. Noga, I would argue, understood the contest for citizenship as she listened to Yochi Genessin address the court. Drawing on her schooling and on her time in the military preparation camp, Noga realized that she could challenge Genessin and, to do so, drew from linguistic and discursive practices in those settings. One might even say that her socialization in those settings, and her adoption of Israeli interactional practices from the age of ten on, suggested to her that she was already participating as a citizen, and that she had the capacity to make claims for citizenship, and to be recognized at court. To begin discussing these issues, we now turn to a brief account of how Latinos fit into and came to see themselves in the Israeli citizenship regime. These historical sketches emphasize a global order of race and political economy, as well as Israel’s place in that order as a colonizing state. These sketches, necessarily brief and incomplete, also present a portrait of those Latin Americans who got to Israel. From one perspective, such sketches should show how labor migrants (that is, non-Palestinian “foreign workers”) became classified in the 1990s in the graduated sovereignty of the Israeli state—a graduated sovereignty that began in important ways from a colonial distinction of Jews versus Arabs. From another perspective, Latinos are part of a much broader phenomenon: undocumented domestic workers in global cities like Tel Aviv. These histories suggest how distinctions in citizenship status have been created at the juncture of these global, national, and colonial processes. We then turn to sketch another history, of the exemplary Israeli citizen, and the interactional practices associated with this citizen’s publicness. At that point, I also describe the approach taken to language and voice in this book.

The History of “Foreign Work” in Israel Israeli society and economy were transformed in the 1990s in multiple related ways, leading to the emergence of a new category of noncitizen, so-called foreign workers.9 The story of how Latinos, among other foreign workers, formed as a distinct population in the 1990s and 2000s, with a noncitizen status, actually begins in 1967—if not earlier. In June of 1967, through war, Israel occupied the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip, among other

8  |  Latinos in Israel territories.10 Palestinians living in those regions did not become citizens, but were partially integrated into the Israeli economy. In the aftermath of the war, the Israeli state attempted to normalize the occupation of these territories, in part by integrating noncitizen Palestinians from those territories into the Israeli labor force, as well as into the commodities market for Israeli goods, while withholding from them most political, civil, or social rights (Gordon 2008; Semyonov and Lewin-Epstein 1987). From 1967 to 1993, and continuing in other forms today, noncitizen Palestinians gained some limited access to Israel-centered social wealth as workers (in particular in the Israeli agricultural and construction sectors). The 1967 war thus produced a new gradation of rights: a new, highly restricted status within Israeli legal classifications for stateless Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.11 These processes, including the continuing settlement of and privileging of the Jewish population within the pre-1967 borders, have led many to adopt Oren Yiftachel’s (2000, 2006) term “ethnocracy” (rather than democracy) to describe the single state that currently exists in Israel/Palestine. Although I do not adopt this term, I accept Yiftachel’s broader point, that a highly differentiated citizenship regime was put in place. Noncitizen Palestinian workers became crucial to the Israeli economy, and thus when Israeli policy makers sought to institute new forms of control after the First Palestinian Intifada (uprising, ca. 1987–1991), a replacement source of labor was necessary. The solution was foreign workers, producing another legal status with a different political economic function. The widespread expansion of state-sponsored guest worker programs was also due to two processes that began in the 1980s.12 First was the neoliberalization of the Israeli economy, as part of a global trend, with the concomitant growth in liberal forms of public sphere rhetoric emphasizing markets and individual rights. As with other countries, the period of neoliberal economic reforms has seen increasing wealth inequalities among Israeli citizens, with racialized Jews and Arabs suffering the most (Sa’ar 2016, 29–41). Changes to political economic organization also saw the growth of a business elite that was sensitive to foreign investment and, for that reason, saw improving relations with Arab countries as an important policy goal (Shafir and Peled 2002, 213–59). This business elite, working through liberal positions that had first been enunciated publicly in the 1970s, accrued greater political influence by the 1990s. With the signing of the Oslo Declaration of Principles in 1993 (the first of the Oslo Accords), Israeli policy makers began to project a new role for Israel in the Middle East, part of a more general repositioning in the post–Cold War era: “the Israeli state began to pursue new diplomatic and economic relations with neighboring Arab states following a template of peacemaking through economic liberalization” (Stein 2008, 4). This liberal positioning is important, as we’ll see especially in chapter 6, in how NGOs fostered the public rhetoric that framed Noga and other noncitizen youth like her as Israelis in all but formal citizenship.

Introduction | 9 The second, related process flowed from the clear failure of normalization, made most apparent by the First Palestinian Intifada. In the wake of this Intifada, Israeli leaders sought to institute a new form of control based on separation. In the new order, signaled by the Oslo Accords, Israeli policy shifted to a goal of permanently separating the noncitizen Palestinian population from the large concentrations of Jewish Israelis. Ostensibly, this separation was part of moving toward recognizing a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip—a recognition that has not come to pass. Expanding guest worker programs, especially in construction, eventually fed into this new politics of separation.13 Checkpoints between noncitizen Palestinian and Jewish-Israeli population centers were increasingly securitized, and the permit system was expanded, so that the numbers of noncitizen Palestinians working with Israeli permits actually reached their peak in the early 1990s. In 1993, with checkpoint closures against noncitizen Palestinian populations becoming frequent, the Israeli government finally caved in to business interests, expanded guest worker programs, and began to severely limit work permits for noncitizen Palestinians (Kemp and Raijman 2008, 61–93). The Israeli state further militarized the shifting boundary around noncitizen Palestinian population centers, including constructing the first barrier around the Gaza Strip—presaging the wall that was built in the West Bank a decade later.14 As Adriana Kemp and Rebeca Raijman put it (2008, 15), the turn to foreign workers was a “virtual separation wall” in the labor market against noncitizen Palestinians, one that preceded the construction of concrete walls. For Israeli businesses, the guest worker programs were meant to alleviate the employment problems caused by the separation policies. And it was business interests that shaped them. The programs institutionally bound workers to their employers, so that leaving an employer automatically cancels the visa—a system that lends itself to exploitation of worker rights, and that has been condemned by the Israeli Supreme Court as a modern form of slavery. Ironically then, in the post–Cold War period, when Israeli policy making seemed most open to liberal positions, the Oslo period also produced the most dramatic restrictions on noncitizen freedoms, both for Palestinians and for labor migrants.15 Ultimately, the convergence of these two processes saw, starting in 1993, a dramatic increase in the number of guest worker permits and labor migrants more generally. By the end of the 1990s, noncitizen labor migrants comprised upwards of 10 percent of the Israeli workforce—roughly equivalent to the proportion of noncitizen Palestinian workers prior to 1993. Guest worker programs grew especially for two sectors where noncitizen Palestinians had been employed extensively, agriculture and construction, and for one where noncitizen Palestinians had not been employed, domestic caregiving for the elderly. Further, it is probable that the government’s lax effort to arrest and deport undocumented residents in the 1990s helped to provide cheaper labor

10  |  Latinos in Israel costs without officially expanding the guest worker programs (Kalir 2010, 44–46; Kemp and Raijman 2008, 104–17). These changes created the labor market for domestic workers, which is how most Latinos earned their bread. The liberalization program contained new policies for domestic care of the elderly, and permits for care workers grew by 350 percent from 1996 to 2002 (Ajzenstadt and Rosenhek 2000; Bar-Tsuri 2008; Kemp and Raijman 2008, 104–8). These eldercare workers were overwhelmingly from the Philippines, yet their presence probably provoked demand for domestic workers more generally, especially among middle- and upper-class families. One survey in 2002 showed that 55 percent of wealthier households were employing domestic workers (cited in Kalir 2010, 43). Especially in the Tel Aviv metropolitan area, it would seem, there emerged the professional household of the global city, which requires domestic workers for its proper functioning (Hochschild 2003; Parrenas 2000; Sassen 2008, 463–65). That is, the changes to Israel’s political economy had significantly increased the number of households in Israel both wealthy enough and sufficiently time-constrained to require domestic workers. These work opportunities helped induce more chain migration, which was vital for the informal paths to Israel taken by Latin Americans, among others.

Latin American Migration Circuits in a Fragmented Globality Latinos began arriving in Israel in the middle of these historical shifts, which indelibly marked how they came to understand their place within Israel’s citizenship regime. But who were the Latinos that ended up in Israel? And why Israel? Certainly no set of long-standing relations of dependency or neo-imperialism existed between Latin America and Israel, unlike the well-documented and longstanding ones between Latin America and the North Atlantic, especially the United States.16 However, the appearance of a large group of unauthorized Latin American immigrants in Israel is still explained in part by their position in the contemporary “fragmented globality” (Trouillot 2003, 47–78), where accelerated movement of (especially financial) capital, as well as shifting narratives of national and racial difference, create or reproduce income inequality on a global scale. With highly insecure income prospects, many Latin Americans sought a path to social mobility. Migration was one important path. Israel was an unexpected destination for this migration circuit. Latin Americans were not systematically recruited as part of guest worker programs. Yet one of the advantages of moving to Israel over other wealthy countries (especially the US) was that Latin Americans did not need a visa prior to boarding a plane. To gain entry, they could arrive in Israel as tourists or pilgrims through the “tourist loophole” (Willen 2003), seeking to see the Holy Land, and overstay their visas. Most Latinos I talked to reported having prepared

Introduction | 11 significant US dollars in cash to show border officials. Importantly, they entered Israel legally with a tourist visa, even though they lost that legal status when they overstayed.17 Compare this to the excruciating journey across the desert that thousands attempt in order to gain unauthorized entry to the US (De León 2015). Later, during the campaign for citizenship, this legal entry to Israel proved necessary for bureaucratically distinguishing the children of labor migrants from noncitizen Palestinians and, eventually, East African refugees who crossed the Sinai peninsula. The earliest waves of Latino unauthorized immigrants to Israel came in the late 1980s and early 1990s. By the mid-2000s, their children were teenagers (like Noga), and they came to play a crucial role in the campaign for citizenship. Hailing mostly from Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Chile, Peru, and Bolivia, Latin American labor migrants largely arrived outside of official guest worker programs.18 Most came through chain migration, where one person helps another to come, building a transnational circuit that wended its way through particular Latin American regions and cities, and even particular neighborhoods. Israeli border and other bureaucratic records were notoriously poorly kept in the 1990s, which makes it difficult to accurately estimate the number of unauthorized immigrant Latinos. Most estimates place it at 10,000 to 20,000, although this number was reduced with the advent of the Immigration Authority—mostly a police force dedicated to deporting—starting in 2002.19 One estimate suggests that in 2007, Latinos comprised about 15 percent of the total 150,000 undocumented labor migrants in Israel (there were another estimated 100,000 labor migrants with work visas at that date).20 Despite the heterogeneous ethnic, national, regional, religious, and class backgrounds of the Latin American migrants, their position in Israel, especially after the mass deportations of the Immigration Authority and the subsequent campaign for citizenship, was the overwhelming factor uniting them. Given my specific purposes, I tend to disregard differences between Latinos based on national, regional, or religious background.21 Latin Americans who came to Israel were not from the most impoverished classes. This is true of most 1990s emigration from Latin American countries in general (Portes and Hoffman 2003). The cost of arriving in Israel was high, estimated at US$4000 or more (Kalir 2010, 61), which generally meant taking a loan from family or friends and working it off. That is, emigrants needed considerable economic resources to start out. This is reflected in their sociological profile. Typically Latin American labor migrants to Israel have a higher than average education compared to their countries of origin, often with postsecondary education, and most were between the ages of 20 and 40 (Schammah Gesser et al. 2000). These migrants, then, are generally of working age, relatively young, and have a desire for upward mobility or at least for economic security, including goals like buying a house in their city of origin.

12  |  Latinos in Israel In their immigration stories, most Latinos explain that they did not arrive in Israel with the intention of staying. Their eventual desire to remain was unexpected. Almost everyone that I interviewed reported that they had come planning to save some money and then return to their country of origin. Yet they kept staying, trying to save a bit more, or just finding themselves comfortable. Most Latinos who had entered were not willing to risk leaving Israel even for a brief time, especially after 2002, when the chances of being denied entry increased. Thus, many Latinos ended up staying in Israel for extended periods of time, sometimes ten to fifteen years, without much hope of gaining legal status. At the same time, most Latinos ended up feeling very attached to Israel and would sometimes state with no little amount of patriotic emphasis, “queremos a este país” (we love this country). As Barak Kalir (2010, 27–30) points out, Latinos, like other unauthorized immigrants, often had much better living and working conditions than authorized guest workers. Outside of the indenturelike conditions of guest worker programs, Latinos found a degree of economic security in Israel, working mostly as domestic cleaners or caregivers for children. Others worked taking care of their employers’ businesses, or in light industries. They could make the equivalent of US$800–1500 a month, or about five to ten times their previous wages in Latin America. This income enabled them to pay off debts, help kin, or buy property in Latin America. It is also important to remember that Latinos in Israel belong to a larger transnational circuit of people—a circuit produced via the practices through which remittances, stories, information, and people travel (Rouse 1991). Most Latinos had family members or friends in the US, Canada, England, France, Spain, and Italy. Several even considered trying to enter the US by foot before leaving for Israel, and one family I knew left Israel to cross por el hueco to the US (“through the crack,” as some called these border crossings). Many others, either deported from Israel or fearing deportation, ended up relocating to Spain or other European countries. Latinos in Israel therefore should not be understood in isolation from these broader transnational circuits and the streams of migration pulled toward informal service work in a “global labor market” (Sassen 2008) that appears in large metropolitan centers like Tel Aviv. Most Latin American economies, already given to great inequality in the 1980s, were gravely affected by neoliberal structural adjustment policies. The growing inequality and endemic economic insecurity, even for relatively well-educated populations, led to greater emigration starting in the 1980s as one avenue of coping (Durand and Massey 2010; Escobar 2010; Portes and Hoffman 2003). That is, Latino unauthorized immigration to Israel fit into global phenomena. The political economic shifts and changes in Latin America and in Israel/Palestine are related, as in the advent of neoliberalizing policies. Even as the impact and

Introduction | 13 effects of such changes were different, these contingencies conditioned the arrival of Latinos, although their experiences remain comparable to those of unauthorized immigrants around the world. On a longer time scale, the arrival of Latinos and other “foreign workers” to Israel was part of “the persistence of older racial orders organized through socially entrenched divisions of labor in which a global working class remains segmented along complexly racialized, gendered, ethnicized, and nationalized lines” (Thomas and Clarke 2013, 310). This global order of race, gender, and labor, rooted in shifting hierarchies, conditioned how Latinos were to join Israeli labor markets, socio-urban spaces, and also public arenas. These complex orders, that is, conditioned how Latinos were to make citizenship-like claims in Israel. Finally, this global order also saw new forms of securitization that affected Latinos in Israel. It is probably no accident that the Immigration Authority was established post-9/11, when border security became a renewed global priority, and state authorities cordoned off access to certain geographic locations through what Nathalie Peutz and Nicholas de Genova (2010) term the “global deportation regime.” Latinos in Israel needed to navigate the relation between the limits to their labor mobility and security apparatuses. They experienced their lack of citizenship in Israel in part through their own “deportability” (De Genova 2002, 2010)—that is, an awareness that they can be arrested and deported relatively easily. Their deportability predisposed their conduct: especially before the Resolutions that granted a portion of them increased citizenship rights, Latinos avoided certain areas, worked only in certain low-skill jobs, and acutely felt the Israeli state’s piercing surveillance. Latinos’ (lack of) citizenship in Israel is thus tied to global processes which both create and deny human mobility.

“Otro árabe más”: The Demographic Demon and Cultural Politics To understand how Latinos perceived their role in the Israeli economy, and the transformations wrought by their migration, it is necessary to consider the public struggle to define Israeli national culture, and how this struggle informs the historical institutionalization of Israeli citizenship. Latinos tended to describe their differences and transformations with terms drawn from public debates about the relations between language, race, and nation.22 Such political struggles position “culture” as static and homogeneous wholes, and take these wholes to explain racialized hierarchies of nation (S. Wright 1998)—without considering how culture is shaped by the establishment of hegemony (Urciuoli 1996; Williams 1989). Many Latinos considered their migration to be a result of lack of economic opportunities in their countries of origin, and frequently blamed Latin American political and economic elites for corruption and wasting resources, and for leaving the majority with very little. Despite such critiques, Latinos largely maintained a national cultural lens when

14  |  Latinos in Israel they reflected on their difficulties in Israel, often attributing them to cultural differences. Latinos share the lens of cultural politics with Israelis, who also tend to evaluate citizens in terms of national-cultural suitability. This cultural politics was especially important in defining the differences between Jews and Arabs. Throughout these chapters, we will see time and again how Latinos find themselves explicitly or implicitly compared to either Israelis or Palestinians, positioned close to one or the other, in ways that are related to their legal status and demographic logic. The racialized distinctions between Jew and Arab came up continually for Latinos, especially in matters dealing with citizenship and the demographic logic underlying much state policy. For example, Father Tomás was a Colombian priest studying in Jerusalem on a student visa. He lived in Palestinian East Jerusalem at a Catholic pension run by three nuns, two Italian and one Palestinian, near the enormous Israeli separation wall. He regularly came to Tel Aviv to help the Latino community that attended the Catholic church of Jaffa. No doubt his travel back and forth between Palestinian East Jerusalem and Jewish Tel Aviv made him sensitive to the way many Israelis perceive non-Jews and especially Arabs. One of Tomás’s friends was Joaquín, also from Colombia, who had a work visa but then married an Israeli citizen and received a blue identity card, signifying his permanent residence status in Israel. When he received it, Joaquín showed off his identity card to everyone. When Tomás saw it, he laughed and said “otro árabe más.” Joaquín laughed and repeated, “otro árabe más.” That is, Joaquín was like “one more Arab” in the demographic logic that obsesses many Israeli policy makers, by increasing the number of non-Jewish citizens in Israel. The humor is based on Israeli fears of the demographics of Jewish versus Palestinian citizens, and the balance of the populations more generally. Such fears color how Latinos came to understand themselves in Israel, and how they, like other unauthorized immigrants, came to be seen by bureaucrats and state officials. In 2017, Palestinians made up 20.8 percent of the 8.68 million citizens of the Israeli state (including East Jerusalem permanent residents), while Jewish citizens comprised 74.7 percent, a ratio that has been fairly steady since 2007.23 Israeli demographers and policy makers fear that if the proportion of Palestinian citizens goes up too much, to say 30 percent, then Israel might demographically—if not juridically—be classified a binational state (Galili 2002; Kanaaneh 2002; Rouhana and Sultany 2003). These demographic fears extend back to the Mandate period, when most Zionist leaders sought to create a Jewish majority on contiguous land as part of establishing an independent state. These fears peaked during the wars of 1947–1949, especially when Zionist militias began to expel Palestinians en masse, and then immediately after the war when the newly formed Israeli state refused to allow 750,000-plus Palestinian exiles to

Introduction | 15 return to their homes (Khalidi 1988; Masalha 1992; Morris 2001, 2004; Pappé 2007). The anxieties continued in the 1990s and 2000s, when Israeli governments sought ways to reduce the possibility that noncitizen Palestinians could gain citizenship, and right-wing intellectuals and think tanks in particular sought to discount demographers’ estimates of the Palestinian population under Israeli rule (Lustick 2013; Rouhana and Sultany 2003; Zureik 2003). These settler colonial anxieties are called the demographic demon (hashed hademografi) by critics, and they haunt Israeli citizenship (Rouhana and Sabbagh-Khoury 2014). They have a long history in racial logics: the Mandate distinction of Jew and Arab drew on a late nineteenth-century orientalist logic, one which also saw settlement in Palestine as an attempt to regenerate the Jewish race (Hirsch 2009). Although today the existence of Jews as a race has been discounted, a racial logic of descent still hangs over much policy about who can count as a Jew for the purposes of Israeli immigration (Steven Kaplan 2003; see also Abu ElHaj 2012). Racialized notions are ubiquitous in evaluating culture. For example, Israeli politicians, state officials, and senior scholars applied these logics when evaluating the supposedly Oriental culture of thousands of Jewish immigrants from Arab countries who arrived mostly in the 1950s and 1960s, and who are now usually called Mizrahi Jews (Chetrit 2010; Hacohen 2003; Shenhav 2006). The racialization involved in the politics of citizenship and immigration is by no means unique to Israel/Palestine (e.g., Basch, Schiller, and Szanton Blanc 1994; Coutin 2003; Shankar 2008; P. A. Silverstein 2004, 2005; Woolard 1989b). However, Israeli demographic reasoning rests on a particular split between nation and citizenship. Israeli citizenship is not formally equated with membership in the same nation. Israelis often compare Israel to North Atlantic countries, where formal citizenship is understood to be an official recognition in the nation—even though the realities of race, class, and gender often undermine that recognition. For bureaucratic purposes, Israeli citizens are formally divided into distinct nations in which settler colonial distinctions are reproduced. This is seen, for example, in how Israeli policy makers distinguish Israel from other countries like the US, Canada, or Australia: while these are countries of “immigration” according to policy makers, Israel is not (Kemp and Raijman 2004, 27; Rosenhek 2000; Willen 2015, 73). As the former Supreme Court Justice Elyakim Rubinstein famously stated in 2005 in an effort to elaborate the legal reasoning of politicians in the early state period: “the character of the state was perceived as a ‘state of aliyah [medinat aliya],’ that is, a state of return [medinat shvut], not a state of immigration [medinat hagira].”24 The “state of return” describes the institutional apparatus by which the Jewish nation is understood to be returning to its homeland (using a descent-based model, or jus sanguinis), rather than going through a process of immigration and naturalization as citizens (using a territorial model, or jus soli). The distinctions of citizenship are maintained

16  |  Latinos in Israel bureaucratically by the Ministry of the Interior and (until recently) were even noted explicitly on the Israeli identity card, where le’om (nation or ethnicity) appears separately from citizenship.25 Under le’om, the Ministry of Interior divides citizens into several other groups, but essentially maintains a British Mandate distinction between Jew and Arab (Robinson 2013, 108; also Peteet 2016, 264). These distinctions, as many have noted, are a result of the historical and institutional subjugation of citizenship to nation (Handelman 2004; Robinson 2013; Rouhana 1997; Shafir and Peled 2002). Shira Robinson in particular describes the complex series of calculations involved in passing a citizenship law in the period immediately after the establishment of the State of Israel.26 The Law of Return of 1950, granting any Jewish person the right to “return” to Israel, was passed first, and thus functioned to subordinate Israeli citizenship to national belonging, as well as to ordain Jewish sovereignty over the state. Here is the crux of the issue for understanding how a group of marginalized and racialized noncitizens could nonetheless come to make claims to citizenship. To describe youth like Noga, the campaign for citizenship used the slogan yisra’eli lekol davar ve’inyan, “Israeli for all intents and purposes.” This claim appealed to a characterization of Israelis where a Jewish Ashkenazi hegemony generally—never completely—holds. “Israeli for all intents and purposes,” that is, does not mean culturally similar to (marked) Palestinian citizens, who for example are generally assumed to speak Arabic and attend Arabic-medium schools. In a sense, an analogy based on public culture was made in which youth like Noga were evaluated as sufficiently similar to their Jewish peers that they should be granted citizenship. However, as with Father Tomás’s quip about otro árabe más, a competing logic was at play that uses a racialized logic of descent to do a demographic evaluation of these youth and their families. Under this racialized logic of descent, Latinos and other “foreign workers” could never count as Jewish, and therefore should not be eligible for citizenship. Noga and her noncitizen peers, as well as their families, were positioned between these different evaluations, between being yisra’eli lekol davar ve’inyan and otro árabe más.27 They were positioned between competing evaluations of race, based on either culture or descent (see Hirsch 2009). Eventually, the cultural evaluation gained enough support from public opinion, including that of politicians, that hundreds of Latino families were recognized as citizens. To understand how, it is necessary to consider how Israeli public culture has been mobilized to make citizens recognizable.

Speaking Like a Citizen: National Language and Voice As in many other wealthy countries, policy makers and employers intended for foreign workers to remain temporarily in Israel. However, as in other countries, unauthorized immigrants have become a permanent fixture in Israel’s social and

Introduction | 17 political space. Political inveighing against “illegal foreign workers” and a desire to move unemployed Israelis to the workforce eventually led to the establishment of the well-resourced Immigration Authority in 2002, substantially increasing the rate of deportation (Kemp 2007). In response, however, a campaign for citizenship took off for the children of labor migrants during the early 2000s. Three government resolutions in 2005, 2006, and 2010 provided most children of unauthorized immigrants present during that period with a pathway to citizenship. As opponents of the resolutions realized, this turn of events contradicted the major ethnonational assumption of the state, namely, that the only legitimate immigration to Israel is one in which Jews “return” to their ancient homeland. Further, these opponents worried these resolutions could change the demographics of the Israeli state. Bureaucrats like Yochi Genessin and former attorney general Elyakim Rubinstein (later a supreme court justice) penned opinions suggesting that any recognition could lead to a precedent for the recognition of noncitizen Palestinians as citizens (Paz 2016, 21). Despite the opposition, in surprising ways, some noncitizen labor migrants suddenly did not seem sufficiently different to deport. Suddenly, to both Israeli public opinion as well as to themselves, noncitizen labor migrants could potentially become citizens. The question is, what was it about Noga and her peers that made them too similar to deport? And why was their appearance in public so compelling? Here, I begin to explore these questions by sketching out a second history of Israeli citizenship and its categories. I will review the cultural politics of national language and interactional directness as vital to the ways that Israeli citizens came to be recognized in public.

Hebrew and dugri as Israeli Publicness When Noga spoke in fluent Hebrew—without any discernible foreign-ness in either phonological accent or semantic usage—that in itself played into a longstanding practice for claiming Israeli citizenship. Nationalist and colonial projects have long included efforts to establish a standard language register for public speech and national imaginaries (Blommaert 2009; Errington 2008; Gal and Woolard 2001b; Inoue 2005; Irvine and Gal 2000; M. Silverstein 1998). The ideology that a consolidated, homogeneous language is required for appropriate speech in public arenas—as a means to unite the citizenry of a nation—goes back to debates about the route to Enlightenment by figures like John Locke and Johann Herder (Bauman and Briggs 2003, 189–96). A further inheritance from this line of thought is the ideology that languages themselves bear culture, and thus language is an important testament to the nation’s past as well as crucial to its survival.28 However, it is not only language by itself that produces the effect of cultural unity. When Noga showed chutzpah and challenged the group of state attorneys,

18  |  Latinos in Israel she displayed an interactional practice that many Israelis consider a typical if somewhat embarrassing aspect of their national culture—a form of cultural intimacy (Herzfeld 2005; Shryock 2004a) by which Israelis can recognize themselves in public. The links between language, nation, and public culture are historically tied to Zionist forms of colonization. In Zionist historiography, Hebrew is considered to connect Israelis to the national past of biblical antiquity when the supposed predecessor of Modern Israeli Hebrew was spoken—an ancient language that was, according to this perspective, revived in the modern era.29 Ron Kuzar (2001, 1; see also Lefkowitz 2004, 82) explains succinctly the nationalist importance: “The Hebrew language is a constitutive element of Zionist ideology, which gives its adherents a clear sense that the Jews are a nation with a language.” Hebrew language plays several roles in constituting the link between Jewish immigrants and the colonial state. First, the ulpan, the intensive Hebrew-language course quintessentially given to new immigrants, came to represent not the teaching of a “foreign” or “second” language, but rather the moment of “reviving” the language in each member of the nation as he or she “returned” to the homeland (Ben-Rafael 1994, 55; Lefkowitz 2004, 135–42; Spolsky and Shohamy 1999, 71–94). Second, like archaeology (Abu El-Haj 2001), Hebrew is seen as the language that substantiates the Jewish nation’s continuity from the ancient past. On the other hand, speaking Hebrew could be taken as a sign of loyalty to Israel. When Israel’s first government debated whether and how to recognize as citizens Palestinians who remained after 1949, some proposals mentioned three criteria: speaking Hebrew, taking an oath of loyalty, and residing within the 1949 borders for a continuous period (Robinson 2013, 100). That is, speaking Hebrew could be a reason to treat Palestinians as deserving of citizenship. These early proposals for the Palestinian citizenship are uncannily similar to the Resolutions for the children of labor migrants passed more than half a century later (see chapter 6). Even though they are not the expected immigrants, when Latinos, and especially Latino children, began to learn Hebrew, they tapped into a deep vein of displaying rootedness to Israel. However, it is not only Hebrew as a language that produces a sense of rootedness, but also the other kinds of interactional practices associated with mythic settlers of the colonial past. Here is where Noga’s chutzpah is so important, since the virtues of the mythic settlers—associated with the sabra, the paradigmatic prickly Israeli, whose very prickliness is a sign of native roots—were set out by the “pioneers” of the early colonial period.30 In their magisterial historical sociology of Israeli citizenship, Shafir and Peled argue that it was the Ashkenazi pioneer of the kibbutz agricultural settlement who, especially in the Mandate period, came to exemplify the colonizing virtues of the redeemed Jew, and thus the exemplary citizen-to-be. As Shafir and Peled explain, the pioneers exemplified the asceticism and selflessness of communal life on

Introduction | 19 the frontier: “The redemptive activities of the pioneers consisted of physical labor, agricultural settlement, and military defense, undertaken voluntarily as service for the collective they led by personal example” (2002, 43). Such labor was especially meant to show in the muscular and mostly male-gendered body of the pioneer (Hirsch 2015, 304–6). Drawing on ancient ideals of polity, Shafir and Peled (2002, 43) explain how the kibbutz agricultural community centered the formation of citizens who could display their redemption from diaspora: “The kibbutz was the polis of the Yishuv: a close-knit, intimate, communitarian body.” They continue with a quotation from the anthropologist Alex Weingrod (1965, 8, quoted in Shafir and Peled 2002, 43): “Idealistic and deeply dedicated, the pioneers formed an elite group—they were the most esteemed members of the colonist society.” Youth movements, which played a vital role in forming settlements and military units until the 1970s, were another site for developing these virtuous characteristics (Ben-Yehuda 1995; Gordon 2008, 123; Katriel 1987; Katz 1985; Zerubavel 1995). The formation of the exemplary citizen thus occurred on the frontier, as part of the Zionist colonization of Palestine. It was these exemplary figures who first set out how Israeli citizens speak in public. The qualities associated with this colonizing citizen also played out in the interactional practice for which the pioneers—and by extension, Israelis more generally—became famous: directness. Directness in this context, and a more general sense of not standing on ceremony, came to represent how Jewish settlers were negating the ways of the supposedly meek diasporic Jews. This interactional directness is generally, though not exclusively, discussed through the descriptor dugri: “Over the years, dugri developed into the hallmark of the Sabra as the New Jew, whose identity was built on a rejection of the Diaspora Jew as depicted in Zionist ideology” (Katriel 2013, 777). As Tamar Katriel (1986, 9–33) discusses, dugri, derived from Arabic, is a word that for Israelis generally has signaled straight talk, and it indexes many characteristics of the redeemed Jew: sincerity, determination, naturalness, solidarity, and an “anti-style,” a form of plain speech.31 Whereas in North American colonial contexts public speech was associated with civilization and politeness (Warner 1990), in the Israeli context many political and military leaders were thought to exemplify dugri personhood. Katriel warns that much had changed since the early pioneer days, yet she also notes the importance of the kibbutzim of the Mandate period and early state period for the production of the sabra who speaks dugri. As with Shafir and Peled’s analysis of pioneering virtues, Katriel explains that, although it can seem confrontational, the use of dugri talk was mostly associated with creating group solidarity. Katriel describes the ups and downs of dugri talk since the heyday of the pioneers in the 1930s and 1940s (see also Maschler 2009), and yet her work shows the continuing importance of this form in the publicness of the Israeli citizen.

20  |  Latinos in Israel Katriel (2004) provides several examples from public sphere debates, and even panics about the changing practices of interaction in the 1990s, which caused worry among some intellectuals that Israelis were losing their ability to talk with directness. Like received pronunciation in the United Kingdom (Agha 2003) and women’s language in Japan (Inoue 2005), perhaps few Israelis actually continue to use dugri in its paradigmatic sense, and then only part of the time. Yet dugri, or more general practices and ideologies of directness in interaction, still provide an orienting point for Israeli debates about national culture and character. I do not mean to give an impression of a uniform Israeli culture, or an unchanging essence. Nor do I want to suggest that there is something inherent in interactional directness that made it suitable to the settlement enterprise.32 Rather, it is the importance of interactional directness to a cultural politics of citizenship that I emphasize. Such interactional practices—beyond the named languages of nationalism—need to be included in studying the Israeli process of settlement. It is what makes the discourse of subjects like Noga so unexpectedly appealing to Israeli public opinion, and to the Israeli prime ministers who eventually passed the Resolutions for citizenship. The voice of the paradigmatic Israeli can suddenly emerge from the mouth of a labor migrant’s child. Further, as I discuss especially in the first half of this book, Latinos found themselves by turns overwhelmed, repulsed, and yet also compelled by Israeli interactional practice. The “strange and repulsive” aspects of Israeli interaction could at once become “familiar and attractive” (see Stasch 2007). For Latinos, Israelis seemed to represent the future by their straight talk demeanor.

The Strangeness of Others’ Voices and the Reflexivity of Language One Chilean family that lived in Jerusalem in the late 1990s sent their toddler Daniel to a Palestinian day care near the Old City.33 The parents laughed that Daniel would sing to his baby sister in Arabic, and say “marhaba” (“hello” in Arabic). At the same time, they worried that he would one day go to a Jewish school and not know how to speak Hebrew. So, in July 2000—only a few months before the Israeli strongman politician Ariel Sharon helped ignite the Second Intifada with a provocative visit to the Noble Sanctuary/Temple Mount in Jerusalem—Daniel’s parents transferred him from the Palestinian day care to a Jewish preschool. This episode speaks to the deep racialization of Palestinian voices, and how it registered in Latino parents’ anxiety about their children’s place in Israel. A Palestinian voice made itself present in this household for a brief time, through the son’s songs and greetings, and challenged the parents’ habitual identification with Israeli Hebrew and interactional practices. When unauthorized Latino immigrants settled in Israel, they ended up identifying with some interactional practices, while holding others at bay. This process of identification is largely unconscious, and it is not frictionless, complete,

Introduction | 21 nor unidirectional. It is, as we will see, full of ambivalence. While Latino adults and children generally picked up, studied, or fluently spoke Hebrew and often some English too, they rarely acquired any Arabic. In a sense, Latinos ended up maintaining Palestinian voices at a distance in their interactions by, for the most part, not learning or speaking Arabic. Latinos thus reproduced a long-standing pattern in which, save for the first immigrants from Middle Eastern countries, Jewish Israelis for the most part do not learn or speak Arabic, except as part of the security apparatus.34 Another way of putting these issues is that as they settled in Israel Latinos became aware of, and adopted to different degrees, several alien and strange “voices.” In essence, they underwent processes that are common to all immigrants to Israel, including authorized Jewish immigrants (olim).35 The adoption of some practices, like those that sound most Israeli, with the simultaneous avoidance of others, like those that sound Palestinian, transformed Latinos and suggested to them their ability to belong. Latino claims to citizenship cannot be understood without taking this process into account. For that reason, I want to linger briefly on the concept of voice I use throughout this book. By talking about voices, I am approaching sociolinguistic variation in the tradition of the early twentieth-century Russian scholar of language and literature, Mikhail Bakhtin. What does Bakhtin mean by “voice”? Generally, voice is signaled by an utterance, one which is recognized in context as belonging to a certain type of person or character (or at least one). As scholars of language have shown over the years, many devices can be involved in the signaling of a voice: from registers of sound, of lexical items or of syntax that have been studied by quantitative sociolinguistics; to distinctive uses of languages in multilingual settings; to particular styles that help animate characters in artistic genres (like novels or films), and more. Voice in Bakhtin’s meaning is dependent on groups of speakers who can recognize the kind of person being indexed by the utterance.36 Further, the recognition of a voice from an utterance makes available to participants the context in which a person like that typically speaks.37 That is, for Bakhtin, entire social worlds are at play in the concept of voice.38 What makes Bakhtin’s approach especially useful is his attention to the constant multiplicity of voices, and their multiple relations one to the other. No voice exists in isolation, and usually our utterances are filled with others’ words, as we quote others, characterize their words, reference them implicitly, argue against them, avoid them, or unconsciously adopt their ways of putting things as our own. We live in a “world of others’ words” (Bauman 2004). As Bakhtin never tired of writing, any concrete utterance already is dialogic—a multivocal relation of competing or harmonious voices—directed as it is at an object as well as at speakers and addressees: “between the word [or discursive sign] and its object, between the word and the speaking subject, there exists an elastic environment

22  |  Latinos in Israel of other, alien words about the same object” (Bakhtin 1981a, 276). As we interact across different contexts, we rely on a reflexivity about our relation to the many other voices in our worlds. Some of these others can be immediately before us, as Genessin was present in the courtroom for Noga, while others we recognize as part of a broader imaginary. Finally, Bakhtin’s approach captures how sociolinguistic differentiation produces constant linguistic and discursive change. As groups of speakers differentiate themselves from one another, they produce linguistic and discursive innovation as well as display their reflexivity about these differences. Bakhtin emphasizes that voices lie at the center of relations between different social groups—relations that he considers multiple and cross-cutting.39 He stresses that people’s awareness of one another is marked by their awareness of discursive difference, and coming to reflexive consciousness, he suggests, is the process of sifting through these differences by comprehending one verbal style through another, one voice through another (Bakhtin 1981a, 291–96, 337–42). All interaction involves this kind of responsive understanding. We are, in a sense, always voicing our own social position as we interact, and thus any utterance involves an important aspect of linguistic reflexivity.40 Latinos often found themselves wondering where exactly they were positioned in Israeli worlds, and how they sounded to others. They wondered about their voice in relation to that of others. For example, Jackie, an Ecuadorian who lived in Tel Aviv for nine years and had two sons, one fifteen and one nine years old, described taking the younger one, Isaías, to her work one day. Isaías met her employer’s children, twins who were the same age as Isaías. This meeting set off an awareness of class distinctions, which Isaías interpreted in gendered terms. When Jackie and Isaías returned home, she overheard him talking to his older brother, saying that the employer’s children talked “like girls.” Jackie reported that she started to pay attention, and felt that her employer’s twins actually spoke more delicately than her boys. Jackie explained the class dimension in her son’s gendered judgment by reference to the voices of her own childhood. She recalled her own mother saying, “it doesn’t matter that we live in a poor neighborhood (barrio), don’t talk like those from the neighborhood.” Although Jackie could barely follow her sons’ Hebrew conversations, she could perceive how their behavior was like their neighbors in a less affluent south Tel Aviv neighborhood. The reflexivity shown by Jackie, or by Daniel’s parents, is typical of how people come to understand their own position within shifting multivocal environments. The arrival of Latinos in Israel meant they would sift through the “infinite gradations in the degree of foreignness (or assimilation) of words” and measure “their various distances from the speaker” (Bakhtin 1986, 121). They thus both unconsciously and consciously positioned themselves within Jewish hegemonic public culture by adopting Hebrew and Israeli interactional practices, as well as

Introduction | 23 by simultaneously avoiding Arabic and Palestinian practices. The conditions in which Latinos lived, largely at a distance from Palestinians, meant that avoiding Arabic was a default.41 In Jackie’s case, she saw another aspect of the workings of Israeli hegemony, where the interactional practices of the working class or working poor, especially Mizrahi, are stigmatized. When Jackie evaluated her sons’ Hebrew practices as from the barrio, she took up the perspective of her employers and the mostly Ashkenazi middle class, and merged it with that of Ecuadorian elites, and their view of her childhood barrio. While Daniel’s parents could avoid Arabic by transferring their son to a Jewish school, in Jackie’s case, she was powerless to do much about the barrio where she was raising her boys. Unlike Daniel’s parents, there was little chance she could change her own status to provide her sons with increased exposure to and identification with how middle-class Israelis (especially Ashkenazis) speak. These multiple and cross-cutting relations of voice are a constant focus of this book. Such an approach is especially important to move us beyond the claims about marginalized and unauthorized immigrants living “in the shadows.” Latinos were rarely in the limelit gaze of Israeli publics, but they were also not in the shadows, disconnected from the happenings of political and social import. Instead, especially in the first three chapters, I show how forms of publicness reverberate throughout the most intimate spheres of Latino life. Whether it be initial shocks of Israeli directness (chap. 1), or the dealings between Latino parents and children, worried about whether they show the right educación (polite conduct) as described in chapter 2, Latinos comprehend their lives in Israel in terms of cultural politics because they live these politics daily. Chapter 3 describes these politics in the small-scale public cultural displays that were part of welfare interventions for marginalized Latinos. In every site, linguistic and interactional practices are a key to how Latinos are transformed by their engagement with Israeli cultural politics. The second half of this book in particular explores Latinos’ engagement with publicness through complex “media worlds” (Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod, and Larkin 2002b). Media worlds under the anthropological lens emphasize the transnational and translocal circuits that form, as participants engage simultaneously in mass media practices that create the effect of large-scale interactions—enabling imaginations of national publics (B. R. O. Anderson 1991) or diasporas (Appadurai 1996), among other collective forms. These media worlds function around what I will refer to as “communicative circuits,” which are constituted through moments of both interpersonal and mass-mediated communication.42 Practices of mass and even small media are essential to how Latinos in Israel engage Israeli publicness and develop claims to citizenship. Chapter 4 examines the way Latinos felt themselves to be full of gossip (chismosos), a sentiment that was

24  |  Latinos in Israel transformed by a local gossip column. The self-description of being chismosos, I argue, involves their reflexivity about being outside of the authoritative public sphere, which produces paradigmatic citizens. The communicative circuits of media worlds are also front and center in chapter 5, which considers a set of phenomena normally left outside the study of citizenship: how the state’s voice can produce complicit subjects. In my description, I begin from how the state’s voice could be “heard” by Latinos, partially through a publicity campaign run by the Immigration Authority, and then I also discuss how the shadowy role of the sapo (informer) helps to intensify the presence of the state in the lives of Latinos. Finally, chapter 6 considers these issues by looking at the campaign for citizenship. I focus on how Latino youth like Noga addressed Israeli audiences by appearing before the news media, and how these appearances enabled the innocent voice of the labor migrant child to address Israeli publics. This innocent voice was cultivated by NGO advocates as media “message” (Lempert and Silverstein 2012), one framed by the NGO’s own more liberal voice. Importantly, the chapter discusses how, in the context of a rightward swing in the Israeli political consensus, the voice of the child did gain significant public acceptance, but the more radical politics implied by the liberal advocate’s voice did not.

Notes 1. shabax is an acronym from the words shohe bilti xuki for a concept like the US term “illegal alien.” It is mostly associated with noncitizen Palestinians but was extended by state authorities to unauthorized immigrants. 2. The phrase “in the shadows” and variations on this metaphor are ubiquitous for describing the global phenomenon of foreign-origin residents with no or only limited legal status, who are often obliged to take on low-status occupations (e.g., domestic or agricultural work). The idea behind the phrase “in the shadows” is that these are people who do not receive any public recognition—meaning no recognition by the mostly elite actors who can command most attention in the public sphere. In the logic of this phrase, it is unexpected when, like Noga, such residents suddenly can be heard. Inadvertently however, the phrase tends to cast such foreign-origin residents as outside of the public sphere, or unable to participate because they are not prominently recognized. However, not receiving uptake is not the same thing as not participating. Noga, and the many other examples in this book, clearly show this is a highly faulty assumption. Beyond those who use the phrase or its variations explicitly are the many scholars who theorize questions of citizenship and migration without taking into consideration how such marginalized residents dialogically orient to the public sphere, and to the voices who exclude them. This tendency to ignore how such residents speak to the public sphere (even if they do not receive meaningful recognition) means this scholarly work ends up being one more public site where the participation of marginalized subjects does not register. To take only one example out of

Introduction | 25 many, in a brilliant essay on deportation, sovereignty, freedom, and mobility, Nicholas De Genova (2010) discusses the case of Elvira Arellano and the new sanctuary movement that she helped start when, facing deportation, she took up refuge in a Chicago church for a year. However, although she became a prominent activist, Arellano’s own public discussion of her actions, and her responsive re-articulation of aspects of US nationalism, does not figure empirically or conceptually in De Genova’s essay. This omission is important to bring up because theorists of citizenship from the Enlightenment on have always attended to public participation. We must ask ourselves whether we want to approach citizenship now without considering the complexity of such participation. 3. This contradiction was understood by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was influential in formulating modern citizenship leading up to the French Revolution. According to Balibar (1989, 1994), this contradiction is also present in the foundational statement of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. See also Brubaker (1992, 40–43) on how Rousseau theorized from a cité-based exclusivist citizenry against the rising tide of centralizing states and their commitment to general citizenship. 4. Holston (2008, 7) summarizes his useful points about differentiated citizenship this way: “This formulation of citizenship uses social differences that are not the basis of national membership—primarily differences of education, property, race, gender, and occupation— to distribute different treatment to different categories of citizens. It thereby generates a gradation of rights among them, in which most rights are available only to particular kinds of citizens and exercised as the privilege of particular social categories.” 5. On these points, see De Genova (2002), De Genova and Peutz (2010), Holston (2008), Holston and Appadurai (1999), Kanna (2010), Lazar (2008, 2013), Ong (1996, 1999, 2006), Rosaldo (1994a, 1994b), Rosaldo and Flores (1997), and Vora (2013). 6. In the case of Habermas, there is much debate about the status of his claims (e.g., Calhoun 1992), as well as about their empirical validity (e.g., Eley 1994; Agha 2011a) or their applicability to non-European contexts (e.g., Hirschkind 2006; Manning 2012; Wedeen 2008) and the many gendered, racialized, and class-based exclusions he does not sufficiently address (e.g., Berlant 1997; Fraser 1992; Landes 1988; Negt and Kluge 1993; Warner 1990, 2002a). See also Cody (2011). 7. Mediatization refers to the process by which large-scale communication is elaborated through the distribution and circulation of commodity forms, like the way that current affairs deliberation occurs through a variety of news sources (from print newspapers, to television and radio programs, to mass texting applications and podcasts) (Agha 2011a, 2011b). In this book I prefer the term “publicness” over “public sphere” or “publicity.” The “public sphere” is generally associated with impersonality and stranger sociality (what we can call a liberal pragmatics of publicness), whereas most of the public forms of expression described throughout this book do not necessarily turn on such liberal pragmatics (e.g., the performances described in chap. 3 or the chisme publicness in chap. 4). “Publicity” evokes public relations and marketing to some readers. 8. On how the urban relations of the city can lead to new claim-making, see Holston (1999, 2008), Lazar (2008), Anand (2011), and Vora (2013). 9. In general, throughout this book, I seek to minimize the use of the term “foreign worker” to avoid taking on the hegemonic perspective, present in the public sphere as well as across the state apparatus, that labor migrants are irredeemably foreign. There is no perfect alternative, but I prefer “unauthorized immigrant” to “labor migrant” since large numbers of

26  |  Latinos in Israel noncitizen Palestinians work within the 1949 Armistice Lines, often as day laborers, making them labor migrants of another kind. (In that sense, “foreign worker” as a term, with all its problems, does end up having a kind of self-fulfilling accuracy. It denotes an exception to Israeli citizenship regimes that emerged in the 1990s, just as the territorial boundary between Israel and noncitizen Palestinians was being reorganized. The “foreign-ness” of “foreign workers” ends up being marked by the fact that they do not count as Palestinians in the bureaucratic and security calculations of the Israeli state apparatus.) Although I use unauthorized immigrant as much as possible, there are contexts where I use one of the others. 10. The borders of Palestine/Israel have a complex and contested history, but are important to defining citizens from noncitizens, or really the gradations between them. The armistice agreements between Israel and Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria at the end of the wars of 1947–1949 set what were considered provisional territorial borders for Israel. Mandate Palestine was essentially partitioned between Israel, Jordan, and Egypt. These borders were to a degree recognized by world powers when Israel was admitted to the United Nations in May 1949. From then until May 1967, these were the de facto borders of Israel. Many Israeli leaders expressed their regret during this period that they had not conquered, in particular, East Jerusalem and the West Bank during the wars of 1947–1949. With the “coerced flight and direct expulsion,” to use Robinson’s (2013, 70) phrase, of over 750,000 Palestinians, the 160,000 or so Palestinians who remained or managed to return after the civil war eventually received citizenship. Yet until 1966 they were subjected to military rule. In June 1967, Israel captured East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai peninsula (this last territory was ceded back to Egypt as part of a peace treaty in the late seventies). Almost immediately after the 1967 war, Israeli officials began to produce and enable settlement in these occupied territories, starting with East Jerusalem. This began a new round of conflicts over Israel’s borders. For this history see among others Abu El-Haj (1998), Gorenberg (2006), Morris (2001), Robinson (2013), and Zertal and Eldar (2007). 11. To be perfectly accurate, there was a recursive gradation within this new status, as the Israeli state immediately annexed an enlarged territory around Jerusalem. Those Palestinians resident in this expanded occupied East Jerusalem received permanent residence, and thus also received greater rights of movement. 12. For this history see Bartram (1998, 2005), Beinin and Stein (2006), Gordon (2008), Kemp and Raijman (2008), and Shafir and Peled (2000, 2002). 13. The labor-intensive construction industry was in desperate need of workers in part due to the enormous growth in authorized immigration from the former USSR after the end of the Cold War (ca. 1989). 14. There are several excellent ethnographies of the Palestinian experience of the new colonial arrangement of separation, and the enormous militarized violence that is continually imposed by the Israeli state. Among others, see Allen (2008, 2009, 2013), Bishara (2008, 2013), Bornstein (2002), Kelly (2006), and Meneley (2014). 15. Or perhaps a better way to say this is that illiberal and liberal forms of political institutions always coexist and shape each other. See De Genova (2010), Vora (2013), and Shoshan (2016). 16. A large and growing literature considers the century and a half of migration from Latin America to the US and Canada, which took place in a context of international capitalist subordination, and which involved a long history of racialization through the politics of immigration and borders (e.g., Anzaldúa 1987; Dávila 2008; De Genova 2005; De Genova and

Introduction | 27 Ramos-Zayas 2003; De León 2015; Dick 2011; Duany 2002; Gutiérrez 1995; Halperín Donghi 1993; Lomnitz 2001; Lugo 2008; Ngai 2003; Sanchez 1993). 17. Three-month tourist visas, sometimes renewable, were usually issued at the border entry. For more on the motivations of Latin Americans who arrived in Israel, see Kalir (2010). 18. A few did arrive with work permits early in the nineties, but those who did reported that they often found that wages and work conditions were better outside the permit system. 19. See Schammah Gesser et al. (2000) and Kalir (2010, 46–48) for discussion of these estimates. Kalir breaks down his total estimate of 13,000 as of 2002 and suggests that Colombians (4500) and Ecuadorians (5000) were the largest components. This largely accords with my own observations. 20. Out of those unauthorized immigrants, the following are estimates of regions of origin, other than the estimate already given for Latin America: Eastern Europe 15 percent, the former Soviet Union 25 percent, South Asia 20 percent, Arab countries 11 percent, and Africa 14 percent (Raijman 2013, 148). See also Kemp and Raijman (2014) for an updated discussion of the forms and numbers of guest worker programs. 21. I did substantial fieldwork with Colombians, Ecuadorians, Chileans, and Venezuelans, and to a lesser extent Bolivians, Peruvians, and Dominicans. Examples in the book come mostly from Colombians, but the differences from those of other national backgrounds are not crucial to the specific arguments here (although see Kalir 2010 on some of the tensions between people of different backgrounds). Furthermore, national background is only part of the story, since there were also great differences in class and regional background within each national category. 22. The term “cultural politics” (or the politics of culture) has a large and long history. I am mostly drawing on its use in the anthropology of nationalism and transnationalism, as well as the politics of recognition. See for example Appadurai (1996), Faudree (2013), Handler (1988), Povinelli (2002), and Rouse (1995). 23. Numbers taken from Ofer Aderet, “Israel’s Population Hits 8.7 Million on Eve of 69th Independence Day,” Haaretz.com, May 1, 2017, http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.786140. Most Palestinian citizens live within the 1949 Armistice Lines, usually called the Green Line. The ratio of Palestinian and Jewish citizens has been fairly stable since 2007. The small portion of citizens who are classified as neither “Arab” nor “Jewish” are generally Christian but not Arab. Noncitizen Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are not counted in the population statistics of the Israeli state, even though Israeli settlers in the West Bank are. 24. See decision in the case of George Niculai Frida v. Ministry of Interior (2005), Appeal of Administrative Petition 1644. 25. Since 2002, the space for le’om on the identity card has been covered by asterisks, although the entry is still available to bureaucrats at the Ministry of Interior. All of this means the Jewish and non-Jewish divide is still readily legible on the identity card in this and other ways. Further, as Amalia Sa’ar (2016, 21) notes, most Israelis and Palestinians can discern something about the ethnic origins of Jews and Arabs by their last names. 26. Israel’s first government wanted to deny the possibility of Palestinian exiles returning and, at the same time, worried about the status of the 160,000 or so Palestinians who remained. The citizenship law could only move forward when the government first passed the Law of Return in 1950, granting to Jews anywhere full national rights (Robinson 2013, 97–111).

28  |  Latinos in Israel 27. The argument I am making here is like that of Aihwa Ong (1996, 741–746), who suggests that in US history, refugees and immigrants are assessed along the white-black racial spectrum. 28. I am drawing here on scholarly work about language ideologies, which are implicit or explicit reflections, judgments, or beliefs about how language and interactional practices (more broadly) function, and how these practices relate to social categories and behavior. See especially Kroskrity (2000), Schieffelin, Woolard, and Kroskrity (1998), and M. Silverstein (1979, 1985a). 29. To be sure, many linguists have impugned the assumed structural continuity of Biblical Hebrew and Modern Israeli Hebrew, even as some misrecognize these ideological claims for inaccurate statements. See especially Blanc (1968), as well as Kuzar (2001, 8–9), Wexler (1990), and Zuckermann (2003). The modern standard register of Hebrew is often celebrated as being the result of a revival of a dead language, thus drawing on nineteenthcentury functionalist ideas about language as a living organism (Errington 2001a, 30–33; Fortescue 2002, 246–50; Benes 2008, 197–240). 30. The term sabra derives from the prickly pear cactus. 31. A typical (but by no means the only) use of the (metapragmatic) descriptor dugri, still widely found in Israeli middle-class interactions, is to frame discourse as particularly frank. To start an utterance with dugri is not unlike in parallel English-speaking environments, where one could frame discourse with “Well, to be perfectly blunt . . . .” 32. On the contrary, some of the rough personhood displayed through directness may very well come from the disdain for insincerity in the Eastern European revolutionary movements of the late nineteenth century, which absorbed many Jewish intellectuals and activists. For one suggestive example from the life of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, see Kuzar (2001, 50–60). 33. At the time, many Latinos used Palestinian services because they were cheaper, and it was not yet overly difficult to cross to and from the Occupied Territories. For example, many Latino children were born in Bethlehem under the care of a Palestinian doctor who spoke Spanish. 34. This claim must be qualified: many authorized immigrants in the state period came from the Middle East and North Africa, especially Iraq, Yemen, Morocco, and Tunisia. They spoke Arabic, and yet often found their Arabic taken as a sign of being backward. For discussions of the racialization of Arabic spoken by Mizrahi Jews as well as by Palestinians, see Amara (1999), Chetrit (2010), Mendel (2014), Shenhav (2006), and Suleiman (2017). 35. This strangeness is not limited to unauthorized immigrants. Tamar Katriel, in the introduction to her seminal 1986 book on dugri talk, writes of her own sense of discomfort with Israeli interactional directness, as a child of parents who immigrated from Europe. Speaking of the paradigmatic settling citizen, the sabra, with whom dugri is most associated, she wrote: “As I discovered in the course of this study, my somewhat uneasy response to the Sabra ethos and the dugri way of speaking was echoed in the talk of other virtual Sabras like myself who were raised in immigrant homes of European origin” (Katriel 1986, 4). The people Katriel interviewed were brought up in a different period, and under different circumstance, than Latino children. Yet my point is about the encounter with this Israeli practice, and the formation of an uneasy relation to it. 36. My understanding of Bakhtin is deeply indebted to linguistic anthropological studies since the seventies (for example, Agha 2005; Errington 1998; Hill 1985, 1995; Rampton 1995;

Introduction | 29 M. Silverstein 1999, 2005; Tedlock and Mannheim 1995; Urciuoli 1996; Woolard 1998). In addition, I have benefited greatly from commentary from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds (for example, Cazden 1989; Holquist 2002; Todorov 1984). 37. For example in discursive transpositions (see Hanks 1990, 192–229; Haviland 1996a, 1996b; Shoaps 1999). 38. Bakhtin (1984) thought that a gifted novelist, like Dostoevsky, was able to make disparate social worlds engage one another through the artistic creation of the novel. 39. For Bakhtin, sociolinguistic variation results from constant change, and therefore it is never fully fixed. This variation is always open-ended, in the process of becoming. Bakhtin’s term for this underlying process has been translated as “heteroglossia,” which refers to how multiple registers, dialects, styles, genres, jargons, etc. are constantly emerging as groups use language in different contexts. Against this tendency toward variety and change, Bakhtin noted (although rarely described in detail) the workings of powerful institutions that seek to produce uniformity and authoritative voices, and in so doing, tend to hold sociolinguistic formations together. 40. The relation between, on the one hand, the reflexivity generated by denotational norms and broader interactional practices and, on the other hand, explicit rationalizations or language ideologies about those norms and practices is complex and has a voluminous literature. For important takes see Agha (2007a), Hanks (1996), Irvine and Gal (2000), Jakobson (1971), Kockelman (2010b), Kroskrity (2000), Schieffelin, Woolard and Kroskrity (1998), and M. Silverstein (1976, 1979, 1985a, 1993). 41. Latinos living in south Tel Aviv (in neighborhoods such as Shapira and Hatikva) or even in Jaffa, as well as those living in Jerusalem, did interact with Palestinians in their neighborhoods, and some even sent their children to schools with a mostly Palestinian citizen student body (like the Catholic Collège des Freres in Jaffa). However, with a few exceptions, they did not generally enter into friendship or kinship circles with Palestinians. I knew of no cases where children grew up speaking stronger Arabic than Hebrew. 42. I use the term “communicative circuits” for three related reasons. First, it includes both mass mediated, or broadcast, communication as well as communication that occurs at smaller scales, laterally and interpersonally. Indeed, smaller-scale interpersonal communication can often draw on aspects of mass mediated communication, and vice versa, in ways that make them parts of a single process that underlies the sense of “circulation” of discourse or text (Agha 2007a, 64–77; Lee and LiPuma 2002; M. Silverstein 2005; Spitulnik 1996; Urban 2001; Warner 2002b, 55–56). Second, I am drawing on the concept of circuit as in Roger Rouse’s (1991) “transnational circuit”—one that does not merely “exist,” but rather is brought into existence by the practices of groups that form across wide and geographically discontinuous regions (drawing also from Appadurai 1990; Ginsburg, AbuLughod, and Larkin 2002a; Gupta and Ferguson 1992). Finally, unlike cases of simultaneity in most theories of publicness (like Anderson’s imagined community or Habermas’s public sphere), here I am not assuming that a group comes to identify itself as a “we”—it can, but communicative circuits can also form across perceived group boundaries. This is important for example in chapter 5 where I describe how the state’s agents can be suspected in all Latino interaction, even between familiars—even “they” can be part of “our” circuits. Certainly, such situations can give way to a more comprehensive “we” of sorts, when erstwhile antagonists can begin to understand themselves as a single group.

1 Becoming Noncitizens Modernizing Agency in Latino Arrivals in Israel

I

n May 2006, the volunteer teachers from La Escuelita, the biweekly after-school program for Latino children, held a birthday party at my apartment in a fashionable part of Tel Aviv. La Escuelita’s staff were a changing mix of Latino noncitizens, fairly recent young Argentinean immigrants, Jewish Israelis who knew some Spanish, and occasionally a Spanish-speaking volunteer from abroad. The meal was a potluck, with an abundance of dishes in a variety of styles, international, Israeli, and Latin American. The meal, like the group that convened, represented a modern, cosmopolitan time and space—removed from the daily grind of most Latinos. It thus produced conversations of the familiar and the strange among different Latinos in attendance, as well as moments of reflection about the path of Latinos through Israel and Latin America. The party connected several participants who were in different phases of arrival. The highly contingent meeting in time and space of three figures in particular—Diego Manuel, Cisco, and Victor—exemplifies how the processes of establishing the claims of citizenship are discursively and linguistically mediated. This mediation involves multiple time and space frames (Das 2008; Eisenlohr 2006), but also a more dominant sense of overcoming great cultural difference and becoming something different. Latinos tended to interpret that transformation as a process of becoming more modern, because Israel seems a more modern country, and especially because Israeli employers seemed to them to embody the modern person: wealthy, individualistic, independent, and highly mobile across state borders—full citizens in every way. This chapter discusses this sense of becoming more modern and gaining agency—an ability to control action and events, and to be responsible for outcomes. These gains come with a feeling of great loss, however. Further, as I will argue, becoming a noncitizen is accompanied by processes that eventually lead to the capacities to claim citizenship. The different positions of three people at the party help to illustrate the stakes of transformation through migration. First, there was Diego Manuel, La Escuelita’s popular director. Diego Manuel had just returned from a trip to Cuba and his native Colombia, and the party was to celebrate his birthday. Diego

Becoming Noncitizens | 31 Manuel was able to exit Israel’s borders and return because he had an Israeli same-sex partner, who had sponsored him for a long “gradual process” (as the Ministry of Interior called it) of gaining permanent residence.1 In the meantime, Diego Manuel had renewable temporary residence, which made him among the few Latinos who could travel outside of Israel. This mobility added to Diego Manuel’s cosmopolitan aura. Yet, at the party, he shared with us some of his anxieties. He told us that while he was in Colombia some people asked him about his accent and where he was born, and that sometimes he had trouble finding the right words in Spanish, as he had become accustomed to Hebrew.2 After a decade in Israel, spent mostly without legal residence status, Diego Manuel had learned Hebrew with great fluency, and something discernible had shifted in his speaking.3 Diego Manuel hated to hear Colombians ask him where he is from, because it made him feel less Colombian. Perhaps that is why he now sported a rooster-tail haircut (cola de gallo), with a ridge in the back, short around the sides, and a flat top—a style he found among his little cousins. Diego Manuel had transformed himself by migrating to Israel, perhaps more successfully than any other noncitizen Latino adult, and yet now he felt somewhat strange in Colombia. His gains in mobility and capacity came with anxieties about belonging. There were other kinds of arrivals that converged at the party, like a new volunteer at La Escuelita, Cisco. Cisco came with his cousin Andrea. While Andrea had been in Israel since the late nineties, Cisco had only arrived about eight months earlier. Both Andrea and Cisco had fled Colombia when drug traffickers began targeting them and their families—one of the dangers, from many Latinos’ perspective, of living in a corrupt country. After receiving several death threats, Cisco left when he narrowly survived a shooting. At the time of the party, Cisco was going through a difficult time adjusting, feeling strong, contradictory emotions brought about by the distance from his family and by his newfound capacity to earn higher wages without threats to his life. At one point, Cisco reflected on the unfamiliar cosmopolitan atmosphere of the party. He looked at the abundant food of multiple varieties and sighed. He told me that in Colombia, there is only one dish at parties, like a sancocho (soup) or sudado (stew), but a lot of it is made. Here in Israel, he continued, there are many dishes, and a lot of everything. Despite the numerous Latinos in attendance, he stated that the party was typically Israeli. This abundance did not necessarily feel welcoming for Cisco. Transnational contingencies brought an even more recent arrival to the party. After checking with me, Andrea and Cisco brought another Colombian named Victor, who had just arrived—a complete stranger to them. Cisco’s only connection to Victor was that they had taken the same tour to enter the country, and the tour operator had introduced them. Buying expensive tour packages was a common strategy among Latinos to enter because it made going through the

32  |  Latinos in Israel border inspection easier. Despite his own difficulties, Cisco felt obliged to help Victor: “when I arrived, I slept on someone’s couch for a week, so I have to help too.” The obligation spawned of earlier assistance made consociates of Cisco and Victor, fellow travelers in time and space. How did the party strike Victor, the new arrival? Victor was fairly quiet at the party, even though much happened in Spanish and many attendees were also Colombian. No doubt, the feeling of strangeness was even stronger for him than for Cisco: only a week into his own attempt to gain greater mobility through higher wages, Victor was confronted by this different form of sociality. And Victor felt moved to respond. After most participants had started to file out, Victor came back to pick up something left behind. After retrieving the item, Victor turned to thank me and my Israeli wife in a way that he had clearly just learned: “toda” (thank you) he said in Hebrew. It may seem like an infinitesimally small act, but standing in the doorway, facing us, Victor had successfully used Hebrew with other Hebrew speakers, in the correct context. These kinds of acts—so fleeting, ubiquitous, and ordinary so as to usually remain outside our conscious awareness—are nonetheless of enormous importance in grounding a person in a place, and moreover in producing the forms of communal ties that can ground political claims. Victor was responding to the Israeli form of the party, and perhaps hoping to gain a sense of control over his destiny—maybe even hoping to end up like Diego Manuel. For most Latinos, learning some jargon Hebrew, or even becoming fluent like Diego Manuel, was an inseparable part of the desired transformation.4 The meeting of Diego Manuel, Cisco, and Victor suggests the variety of positions that Latinos could occupy in Israeli social space, and moreover, the ambivalence and anxiety produced by the migration. At the same time, when pushed to explain their experiences, most Latin Americans who made the move to Israel expressed an understanding of it as a process of personal modernization. Someone like Diego Manuel, who embodied great mobility and could move fluidly between Latino and Israeli contexts, exuded the more “modern” personhood that Latinos associated especially with their Israeli employers—a potential telos for their own migration.5 This is not to say that Israel is actually more modern than the Latin American countries from which they set out. Rather, whichever country they came from, these adult border-crossers consistently comprehended everything about Israel, from food to customs, from kin relations to gender norms, from language to interactional practice, as being more “modern” than what they knew before their departure. Latinos comprehended much about their migration to Israel in terms of what Hilary Parsons Dick (2010, 2018) calls the “modernist chronotope,” or space-time frame (see below).6 These temporal and spatial aspects of understanding their mobility produce tremendous ambivalence in adult Latinos, as well as strong memories of the excruciating and disorienting period

Becoming Noncitizens | 33 of getting accustomed to a “modern” country. For Latinos in Israel, the “gains” of personal modernization afforded by their migration came at a significant cost. The “losses” of modernization are many, and generally involved not only losing the moral anchor and intimacy of family, but also responding to the unfamiliar publicness of Israel. To examine these modernist aspirations, I will first discuss how Latinos comprehend the time and space aspects of migration, as well as the disorientation of arriving in Israel. I examine how a sense of personal agency is produced through acquiring linguistic abilities as part of overcoming the disorienting period. I then consider some of the “pioneers” who arrived in the late 1980s and early 1990s with few contacts, and how they set a pattern for acquiring the capacities to claim citizenship. After discussing the role of the good employer (jefe), as well as the sense of great loss, I end the chapter by examining how Latino language ideologies connected speaking like Israelis to what they considered more modern forms of agency.

Time, Space, and Agency of Noncitizen Latino Mobility For the most part, Latin Americans who moved to Israel explained that their reasons were economic. They are what Gloria Anzaldúa (1987, 9–13) called “economic refugees,” forced to consider leaving their homes because of a history of global policies and economic relations that helped to produce widespread regional poverty.7 Latinos blamed the poverty they experienced on Latin American cultural propensities, including elite corruption. That is, they by and large adopted the geopolitical categories of capitalist centers, and represented Latin American regional poverty in ways that obscure “the less tangible historical relations among people” (Coronil 1996, 77).8 In addition to perceiving regional political economy in terms of culture, Latinos experienced leaving Latin America and arriving in Israel as a drastic change in culture, or kind of cultural modernization. Despite the way that Latinos represented their departure, the range of economic problems they mention is endemic to the systematic underdevelopment of the Global South. The Latin Americans who arrived in Israel were among the many around the world who, in one way or another, “are deprived of the promise of modernization by the inherent propensity of capital to create edges and undersides in order to feed off them” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012, 120).9 The kind of mobility produced by these global political economic conditions produces subjects—always at the precipice of increasing poverty—that nonetheless are willing to risk the relatively large amount of US$4000 in an attempt to secure their financial future through migration. Latinos typically recounted their lives in Latin America as ones where the soon-to-be migrant was just getting by, with no opportunity for upward mobility. Those who left in the period from the late 1980s until the early 2000s explained

34  |  Latinos in Israel that they earned the equivalent of US$50 to sometimes US$300 per month in their countries of origin, while in Israel, working as domestic cleaners or caregivers, they could earn the equivalent of US$800–1500. In a fashion typical of labor migrants worldwide, they generally measured their social mobility through the purchase of high-value property like residential homes, businesses, automobiles, or the completion of postsecondary education toward professional occupations. Higher wages and property ownership were hallmarks for Latinos of a more modern form of independence. For example, one longtime Colombian resident of Tel Aviv, who in 2004 returned to Colombia, explained that prior to arriving in Israel, she was doing fairly well as a bookkeeper. However, it bothered her that she would never be able to live independently of her parents, especially as a single woman. More than anything else, she wanted to buy her own house. There were multiple reasons Latinos in Israel could not achieve such goals. Some recounted finishing postsecondary education but then finding themselves unable to gain stable professional employment, something endemic to many Latin American countries (see Jiménez 1999). Others told of a stable or even an improving economic situation that was suddenly disrupted by national economic crises, like the deterioration of the Ecuadorian economy of the late nineties or the devastating earthquake that hit Armenia, Colombia, in 1999. In other cases, the crises were more targeted. Several Colombians described troubles with drugtrafficking rings, paramilitary militias, or guerrillas. Others explained that their migration resulted from problems like marital failures or unplanned children. Once the chain of migration was established, Israel offered the opportunity to maintain, regain, or possibly even improve social standing through higherwage, if often lower-status, labor. For those who felt that their situation in Israel had led to another period of stagnation, the hope was that the improvement in social status would be achieved by children trading on the improved earnings of their parent. The children of Latino labor migrants—that is, the “1.5 generation” (Chavez 2013; Gonzales and Chavez 2012) which spent a large part of their childhood in Israel—also believed that their parents came to Israel seeking a better future, especially for them. Even Latinos who recounted their migration as resulting from personal problems, such as attacks by drug traffickers, attributed the lack of security or political corruption to the poverty and underdevelopment of their country of origin. That is, Latinos placed their lives in a space-time framework of migrating from a traditional and underdeveloped country to a modern and developed one, and the continuous comparisons between these places suffused everyday life. Further, these comparisons of place were closely and recursively associated with the characteristics of people, Latinos versus Israelis. Many of the adult, pioneer Latino generation saw themselves as displaced by political economic forces outside their control. Yet learning Hebrew, establishing relations with

Becoming Noncitizens | 35 good employers, and making a better living all contributed to creating a sense of positive momentum, of gaining some control over their personal trajectories—of gaining agency. To understand such evaluative frameworks, scholars of language have turned to Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1981b) concept of “chronotope”: time, space, and their relation to types of people. Made up from the Greek roots for time (chronos) and place (topos), the term is meant roughly to capture how we produce and experience “representation[s] of time and place peopled by certain social types” (Agha 2007b, 321). As Agha notes, chronotopes are produced not only by the narrative of actions and events, but also in the time and place in which the act of narration is presented. In the opening example, for instance, the party is one chronotope, which Cisco thought was typically Israeli. On the other hand, when Diego Manuel narrated to us his experience of traveling to Colombia, he produced another chronotope that he related in the time and space of the party. Broad cultural understandings (or models) of time and space are at stake in analyzing chronotopes (Lempert and Perrino 2007; Parmentier 2007). But also at stake are cultural understandings of agency—of who controls action and events, and how new capacities are cultivated.10 Bakhtin characterized chronotopes by the kinds of encounters, by the specific cause and effect relationships—as well as figures—that produced action, and by the kind of knowledge that is treated as effective. When Diego Manuel narrated his travels, he produced a representation of a setting where, after years abroad, he meets Colombians. That is, in telling his tale, he attributed to himself a degree of agency to move along transnational circuits, and to enable certain kinds of personal encounters. While Diego Manuel was close to approximating the agency of an Israeli citizen, Cisco and Victor were only beginning to respond. The comparisons that Latinos drew between Israel and Latin America, as well as between Latinos and Israelis, constantly drew on the temporal and spatial (or chronotopic) associations. Latinos considered Israel to be a modern place, with social and technological progress, and where they too could eventually lead a modern life. When they talked about Israel, they generally meant the Israel of the upper and middle classes, or the Israel they associated with their employers. They did not focus as much on the many disenfranchised and impoverished Jews and Palestinians.11 On the other hand, Latinos spoke about Latin America as a traditional region. One aspect of this traditionalism they mentioned was a great deal of corruption or problems like crime. Latinos attributed the general impoverishment of the population to this corruption and crime—to the wealthy elites who kept everything to themselves. But another traditionalist aspect was the large, extended networks of kin and friends many Latinos had at home, and in Israel they felt much more alone. In Israel, they missed the calor de familia (familial warmth) of living among so many kin and friends, and the alegre

36  |  Latinos in Israel (joyful) way that family, and Latin Americans more generally, treat each other. The trade-off, as most Latinos saw it, was living a more modern life in which they were more financially independent, but also a lonelier and less joyful life. The example of Diego Manuel shows how Latinos could come to approximate citizens by gaining capacities associated with Israeli publicness. Although Diego Manuel was not an isolated case, not many Latinos managed to gain his level of social mobility. However, all Latinos had to engage the challenges produced by the presence of Israeli publicness throughout their social lives, even in more intimate spheres. They also made claims about a warmer, more joyful publicness that they had left behind. These aspects of cultural politics constantly played out in Latino social life. And, as we’ll see, from the very moment of their arrival, Latinos understood gaining control of their destiny involved acquiring interactional capacities.

Disorientation: Shifting Forms of Agency At the time of the party, Cisco was in the midst of a very difficult time, challenged by the contradictions of his new life. He was in a period of disorientation, as I’ll call it. Latinos who managed to enter the country and avoid deportation describe this period as lasting the first year or two after arrival, when they encountered tremendous difficulties, from finding housing and work, to losing contact with their closest kin, to being cheated out of wages or money. Becoming accustomed to life in Israel meant overcoming these trying times. As many Latinos knew, not everyone managed the transition. Some left before they could establish themselves. A year before his arrival in Israel in late 2005, Cisco had been a successful manager at a business in Colombia. His relation to his cousin Andrea would spell the end of that life, however. He ended up in Israel as an extension to the story that started with Andrea and her former husband, Cecilio. As Andrea explained it to me, in the mid-1990s, Cecilio had published a couple of news articles on one of the drug mafias, which led to attempts on his life, and subsequently to their decision to flee to Israel. Cecilio was deported back to Colombia in the early 2000s, just after the birth of their second son, and Andrea lost contact with him. However, Andrea’s family in Colombia began to receive threats, and Cisco’s sister was hit by a car and eventually died of her wounds (Cisco and his wife took over care for this sister’s daughter). After receiving several threats, Cisco himself was stopped in his car and shot. It was this series of events that led to Cisco’s decision to flee to Israel without his family.12 The separation from his family produced enormous emotional and economic contradictions for Cisco during his period of disorientation. Cisco eagerly sought ways to end the separation. I first met Cisco soon after he arrived, when he and Andrea applied for asylum in Israel. Their application for asylum was

Becoming Noncitizens | 37 based on the threats to their lives that resulted ultimately from Cecilio’s political reporting almost a decade earlier. I took Andrea and Cisco to a legal clinic at the local university, where a group of lawyers decided to help them prepare their case for asylum. At that time, they asked the lawyers about bringing their immediate families. Andrea and Cisco explained to the lawyers that if their loved ones were taken hostage in Colombia, then they would be forced to return. The lawyers explained that the Ministry of Interior moved very slowly, and did not have any provision for bringing families. A month later, I saw Cisco at a large Latino New Year’s Eve party at a resort in Eilat. Sunning in Eilat, taking in the touristic scenery, he was in relatively good spirits. He reported that he had just rented his own room, and that he was looking into possibilities for his wife and daughter to travel to Spain, where he might join them. Cisco soon became desperate, however. Three months after Eilat, he was still working on these transnational maneuvers. He told me that perhaps both he and his wife would each marry Spaniards to get Spanish residency, but that they would not be able to bring their daughter immediately.13 By May, only a week before Diego Manuel’s party, Cisco was distraught, unable to stomach the separation any longer. His manner was unusual, since Cisco always seemed imperturbable, preternaturally upbeat—alegre. Since I was volunteering with an NGO that deals with labor migrant issues, he wanted to consult with me about marrying an Israeli. Someone had told him that if he were to marry an Israeli for residence, he would be able to bring his family immediately. I told him about the complex “gradual process” that the Ministry of Interior had set up for cases of marriage with unauthorized immigrants, and why it could take five or more years before he had citizenship. Cisco seemed to deflate: “I have work, money, and a fridge full of food, but I don’t have my family next to me, and therefore I have nothing.” The events that had started with Cecilio reporting on the drug mafia continued with Cisco experiencing a severe disruption to the life he had been living, taking him far away from his most familiar contexts. Cisco did make it through this period of disorientation. He remained in Israel, but eventually became estranged from his wife. By moving to Israel, he gained personal safety, but lost the domestic intimacy of his Colombian family. He lost calor de familia. Victor did not make it through this period. I did not see Victor again, but a month after the party, I asked about him. Cisco told me that Victor had stayed with him for a week, but that Victor could not adjust and began acting very erratically. According to Cisco, Victor started to get very paranoid and would call Cisco, asking him if he heard what “they” were saying, and also stating that “they’re going to kill my wife.” Victor also asked Cisco whether the latter had any friends. Cisco explained to me the meaning of this question: in Colombia, one

38  |  Latinos in Israel has the habit of going out and meeting one’s friends in the street. Cisco said that Victor would go into the street wearing only pants, without shoes, and that once Cisco found him talking to a corner store owner in Spanish, and the store owner responding in Hebrew. Cisco interpreted Victor’s presence in the street wearing only pants, or talking to the store owner, as an attempt to find the familiar neighborhood street life he had in Colombia. Finally, according to Cisco, Victor went to the central bus station in Tel Aviv in order to find a way to the airport, where he turned himself in to a police officer. As opposed to his successful “toda” after the party, all of this points to how Victor was unable to ground himself successfully in interaction. Victor turned himself in for deportation from Israel only about eight weeks after he had arrived. I cannot confirm Cisco’s story about Victor’s behavior, but it does point to the enormous strain that migration placed on Latinos after their arrival. The story about Victor also points to the difficulty of finding familiar environments, which can ground a person’s sense of well-being and of being tied to a community. Together with the experiences of Cisco, and Cisco’s failed attempts to reunite with his wife and daughter after leaving Colombia, we see a number of ways that Latinos sought to reestablish familiarity after arriving. The lack of familiarity and strain of adjusting opened Latinos up to engage Israeli forms of interaction. All adult Latinos who made the voyage to Israel agreed on one thing: they were irreparably transformed by the experience. The strangeness of the initial disorientation and difficulty of adjusting gave way to a feeling of a hard-won familiarity with Israel. Latinos overwhelmingly interpreted this process of disorientation and transformation as one of self-modernization, invoking in multiple ways these temporal and spatial aspects. At the same time, Latinos’ sense that they had suffered and overcome also lent them a basis to make claims to remain in Israel.

Starting a Chain: Latino “Pioneers” and Citizenship In Israeli colonial history, there are waves of early European settlers who are known as the pioneers (chalutzim or xalutsim). This term is used to refer to those settlers who arrived in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century and established the first Jewish settlements in Ottoman or Mandate Palestine.14 The first Latinos to arrive in Israel in the late 1980s and early 1990s were likewise pioneers of a sort. They had few or no relationships with anyone else in Israel. Their arrivals were often highly accidental, and yet they began what sociologists call migration chains, where one person brings another from their extended networks.15 Although I apply the term a bit tongue-in-cheek, the Latinos I’m calling pioneers did more than establish chains of migration. They established patterns for engaging Israeli publicness and set out a path to gain the capacities that would later allow Latinos to make claims of citizenship.

Becoming Noncitizens | 39 The arrival of unauthorized immigrants to Israel challenges the abstract bureaucratic position regarding citizenship: that people either are or are not citizens. Even entering Israel on a tourist visa enabled the first Latino pioneers to acquire certain capacities, such as housing, work, and a limited mobility— mostly without much fear of deportation in the 1990s. These were not full-fledged rights. They were not recognized by a juridical system and by public opinion (although some labor law did apply). At the same time, such capacities accrued from the moment that a border official stamped a passport and allowed these Latino border-crossers to enter. In 1989, Diana Laura was one of the first Colombians to arrive in Israel, which helped establish a chain of labor migrants that probably amounted to a couple of hundred, if not more.16 Her move to Israel was entirely contingent. The US was her original destination. No one she knew in Colombia had left for Israel. Among her family, she was the first to leave Colombia. When I interviewed Diana Laura in 2006, she explained her reasons for migration in typical economic terms. Before leaving, she had worked in a hardware store, and her wages had only covered immediate costs. She had begun working at the age of 10, and completed her high school diploma in the evenings at the age of 20. Her family of eleven siblings was renting and could not buy a home, and she wanted something more. Before finding out about the possibility of moving to Israel, Diana Laura joined a group that was preparing to walk across the US border, por el hueco, as it is known, “through the gap.” Ultimately, she decided against this plan when someone that left before her was killed. Despite her kin’s skepticism, Diana Laura explained she did not doubt herself, because of her desire for upward mobility. She expressed her desire for social mobility in terms of professional status, to become an architect (translated here from Spanish): No one believed that I was going. But no, I certainly always wanted to leave because of the pressure of the economic situation of my country. Also, I always wanted to improve myself [superarme] because my ambition was to have been . . . an architect.

Her family could not afford to send her to high school, much less provide her the opportunity to study in a university. When she narrated the journey of seventeen years earlier, Diana Laura described a voyage where she had little control over her movements, and where she encountered people by chance.17 She attributed to herself little agency or prior knowledge. Diana Laura recounted that the migration began when, at the age of 28, she saw an advertisement in the employment classified ads about leaving to work abroad. The advertisement led her to an employment agency that tried to sell her work visas to three Anglophone countries to care for the

40  |  Latinos in Israel elderly, but all at prices she could not afford. Then they mentioned Israel, which was a thousand dollars cheaper. Diana Laura noted that at the time she did not even know how to find Israel on a map, having only heard about it from the Bible. She recalled the employment agent telling her that Israel is just like the US “but smaller,” with lots of opportunity to work. Her family thought that Israel was too far. But she took the plunge, thinking that she was getting a visa and an initial work placement from the company. She paid them US$3500, which she got from her severance from the store, plus bank loans from relatives. On top of that, she paid another US$1150 for her plane ticket, also borrowed from relatives. When she left, it was the first time she had been on an airplane, or out of the country. Apparently Diana Laura became suspicious when the employment agency did not provide a pre-issued work visa in her passport, and because the company told her that at border inspections she should only state that she was on tour and not coming for work. Not surprisingly, the agency disappeared shortly after she left. The accidents of migration only accumulated as Diana Laura set out, leading to a period of great hardship and disorientation. The few preparations she had made went awry when, on her way to Tel Aviv, she was taken off the plane during her stopover in Madrid and detained there for five days without explanation.18 Just as suddenly she was returned to her itinerary and flew to Tel Aviv. Needless to say, in Tel Aviv, no one was waiting for her, nor was there anyone for her to contact. Diana Laura remembered this initial disorientation as one where she lacked language, interactional capacities, and money: No one was waiting for me in this country. I arrived in this country and here I didn’t know anyone. And I arrived at the airport and I didn’t even know the language. Because the only language I knew was Spanish. And at the time I arrived, they couldn’t find anyone in the airport who spoke Spanish. I passed through [passport control]. And when I left the airport, I thought “What should I do with this suitcase?” And I only brought a hundred and twenty dollars. Of money. Because I was told that they would wait for me here. And there was no one. Nobody was waiting for me.

Eventually she was taken by a taxi to a cheap hostel, where a friendly receptionist helped her find her first job working as a maid in an elite Tel Aviv suburb. There she began working, six days a week, from dawn to dusk, for a measly wage of US$350 a month—which, nonetheless, was three times what she had earned in Colombia. After a time, she also met other domestic workers from Colombia, Chile, and Brazil, who helped her understand how poorly she was being paid and how hard she was working. Although it all occurred seventeen years earlier, Diana Laura was able to tell me in great detail the kinds of encounters that clued her into her difficult situation. She chronicled in typical ways this period of disorientation: her first low-paid jobs, sleeping in the laundry room, and working

Becoming Noncitizens | 41 extremely hard. Diana Laura even recounted that she was left to take care of the household pets during the First Gulf War of 1991, while her employers took their family to London for safety.19 In her narrative, the period of disorientation closes when Diana Laura gains new interactional capacities. In this case, Diana Laura decided to learn English, a very common language in Israel. Diana Laura considers it the point where she began to gain control over her work situation. When she explains the difficulty of her work and living situation, she puts it down to not having the right linguistic abilities: “Yes, it was very hard, yes. Because I didn’t know the language very well, or anything, and I was only five months here.” However, getting to know other domestic workers helped her. She explained that a Brazilian friend suggested learning English, and helped find night classes. According to the Brazilian friend, in Israel everyone speaks English—this was true at the time especially of the upper and middle classes—and English would help Diana Laura wherever her life course would take her, even outside of Israel. Diana Laura associated her improving work life to this decision: “And truthfully, when I learned English, I learned to defend myself more here, among the people, and to speak. What I didn’t like, what I didn’t want. And like that, the time began to pass.” Diana Laura connects her ability to gain agency over her life course, and make claims on Israelis, directly to the acquisition of a new language. Her capacity to gain housing, get better work, and bring other family members all start at that moment. In short, Diana Laura, a pioneer, followed a series of contingencies to find work in Israel where she might be able to achieve social mobility, to “improve myself ” (superarme), meaning to overcome the constant strain of the poverty in which her family lived in Colombia. At the same time, she set a pattern that would be continued by the family members who followed her. She did not always help financially, but as she put it, as the first to leave, “to each I gave the courage to persevere, to each to leave our country to look for a better future for their children.” By her count, eighteen other family members, including many of her sisters, left Colombia in her wake, mostly to Israel, but when the deportations intensified, also to England, Spain, and Germany. Israel is part of a Latino transnational circuit where improvement and self-­development can occur. The contingencies that brought Diana Laura to Tel Aviv were repeated throughout the stories of longtime Latino residents. Those who arrived very early even described themselves as pioneers of a sort, who made the path easier for those who followed. Ignacio, for example, came from an infamous neighborhood in Armenia, Colombia, from which many Latinos arrived in the early nineties.20 Through his brother, who arrived two months prior to him in 1991, Ignacio could trace his migration back to the first migrant from that neighborhood.21 Ignacio

42  |  Latinos in Israel noted how difficult it was for him and others who arrived in those early days, in particular because men were not considered typical domestic workers (in Spanish): Whoever arrives today in Israel, he already has the whole field open. We already opened the breach. We opened the path. Whoever comes today has a place to arrive, family, work, everything. We didn’t have this. We were just starting out. First of all, the language. The language was very difficult because those who were here were just getting started with the language. The jobs, well—there were jobs, but because of not knowing how to defend ourselves [i.e., in interaction], and also because of being unaccustomed that—For the people here it was very difficult to understand that a man would arrive to work, and in a house.

Many men described the difficulty they had adjusting to doing domestic cleaning, never having done it in Latin America, and having believed it to be women’s work. Ignacio also described the great hardship he endured when he arrived, even needing to sleep on the beach on his days off, for lack of a place to go. Latinos’ descriptions of the poverty of their country and the economic necessity of emigrating, as well as the difficulty of emigrating for the first time, generated a powerful consensus among them. Despite differences among them in national, regional, ethnic, and religious background, they shared these experiences of understanding their role in Israel, and even eventually a sense of gratitude and loyalty to Israel.22 The children of adult migrants concurred with these commitments: when asked, the most common answer they gave was that their parents came to Israel to look for work, and “for a better life for me.” The foundational story involved learning to overcome the hardship of migration, which included grounding themselves by learning to speak like others in Israel.

El Buen Jefe (The Good Employer) If Latinos could blame the elites of their countries of origin for corruption and wasting wealth, in Israel, they often formed strong patron-client bonds with their Israeli jefes (employers). These bonds were important for coming out of the period of disorientation, and employers often became vital guides to Israel, helping with everything from hand-me-downs to getting apartments to mediating with school officials. Indeed, the most successful Latino adults were those who parlayed their contacts with jefes into greater capacities and mobility. Some Latinos worked for wealthy, powerful Israelis, like leaders in industry, law, politics, bureaucracy, and the like. When I got to know them in 2004 to 2007, these Latinos often had already worked with their bosses for ten to fifteen years, and were treated with complete confidence. In several cases, Latinos had become the chief housekeeper and caregiver for the family’s children.

Becoming Noncitizens | 43 Such was the case with Ignacio, who ran his jefes’ small business and looked after their apartments, as well as an Ecuadorian, Anita, who worked for a mother and daughter of Latin American origin and also cared for the daughter’s son (or as Anita put it, she cared for the child as if he were her own). Latinos like Ignacio and Anita usually worked extremely long hours, but also received extensive support from their jefes, for example, to set up television, phone, or gas accounts. Such jefes also acted as intermediaries, for example, helping Latino workers to communicate with teachers and principals, or to receive medical attention. Others lent Latino workers their apartments or cars on occasion, and passed on expensive commodities no longer in use (like TVs or computers). Not all Latinos worked for Israeli elites, but all considered steady and strong relations with a buen jefe or jefa to be paramount to establishing themselves in Israel. The importance of these bonds became especially clear when trouble arose. For example, when Luna, a Colombian who had arrived in the mid-nineties, was having health issues in 2005, it was one of her elderly jefas who helped her figure out how to afford the monthly health insurance payments.23 Luna’s jefa told her that each of Luna’s employers should pay an extra 50 NIS a month to cover the health insurance, and also that they should give her an hourly raise. Luna was very pleased when all but one agreed to the new arrangement, and she got coverage. Luna had gained a basic right of Israeli citizenship, health care insurance, through the help of this jefa. Yet, only a few months later, Luna called me, beside herself in tears. Her jefa could not find some of her jewels, and now she suspected Luna. Luna had spoken with the jefa’s children as well, and the police were mentioned. Luna did not know what to do, asking again and again, how this jefa could accuse her of stealing. The police never intervened, but Luna lost an important patron. Due to the importance of these patron-client relations, Latinos took great care to maintain them. Such relations bred expectations for the worker as much as the employer. Employers were important sources of goods that circulated among Latino networks. Melisa was used to getting sacks of hand-me-downs from her employers, owners of a jewelry store, which she redistributed among her friends—part of her own practice of building communal ties. However, when the wife’s mother passed away, she complained that she did not receive any goods, even though Melisa had cleaned for the mother as well. The jefes understood that Melisa had expectations: they apologized to her for this omission. The relation to employers also helped to produce a sense of the cultural differences that Latinos were experiencing. The jefes’ voice often came to inhabit Latinos’ ideas about Israeli culture. Further, the jefes’ home became for Latinos an important window into Israeli intimacy, which often surprised them.24 Latinos often repeated their jefes’ explanations about Israeli culture, as well as telling stories—sometimes with admiration and sometimes in shock—about what they

44  |  Latinos in Israel saw in homes of jefes. This sense of cultural differences extended to describing what made Latinos better workers than Israelis—meaning in particular the highly racialized Israeli working classes and working poor. On the one hand, many employers told Latinos that it was their cultural behavior that made them better workers than Israelis (rather than docility born of precarious status). Ignacio, for example, repeated what he heard from his jefes, that Israelis like Latino workers because they are joyful, alegre, and warm, calido. On the other hand, jefes represented the epitome of the modern life to which Latinos aspired: jefes modeled the modern, cosmopolitan social life that always lay out of reach, somewhere in the future. The patron-client relations that developed between Latino and jefe produced a vital tie to Israel, but also made Latinos reflect on their own cultural difference. That is, the relation to the jefe both enabled Latinos to gain capacities of citizenship and reminded them of their noncitizen status. It reminded them of a full citizenship that only accrued to those who seemed to exemplify the fully modern person.

The Losses and Gains of Modernization In one of the editorials of the short-lived weekly Latinos de Hoy (Latinos of Today), published in Tel Aviv in 2000, the editor Cecilio waxed nostalgically about leaving his native Colombia. He started with: “It’s said that no one knows what they have until they lose it. That seems to be the lesson that we receive from leaving our country for unknown lands.” He then went through some of the realities and discomforts of living in a foreign land, including the need for good manners and for an ability to share with others in order to economize and save. He then noted the following about his adopted country: “Israel is for Colombians a good example of survival, a country with an enormous water shortage, with desert lands, with problems of peace, and in spite of these difficulties the Jews export vegetables to Italy and the Balkans. Colombia is a country rich in flora and fauna, enclosed by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, with enviable climate, with kind, joyful and smiling people, with human warmth.” He continued on in this touristic voice before concluding “and yet we don’t appreciate it until we end up losing it. In the meantime, let’s try to live with a spirit of coexistence and let’s respect foreign laws. And remember . . . Colombia is a country of dreams [un país de ensoñación].” This editorial captures how Latinos understood their travels to a modern country as a larger tale of Latin America’s own troubles, and especially with a cultural politics about the “mentality” of Latin Americans which found its paradigmatic example in the supposed corruption and depravity of Latin American elites. As the editor suggested, Colombia could be a wealthy country based on its natural resources. Ignacio had a theory about why Latin Americans are not able to accumulate wealth, especially when living in Latin America. He related it directly to the

Becoming Noncitizens | 45 “human warmth” mentioned in the editorial. This cultural propensity creates problems, according to him. During a discussion I had with him and Angelina (also a longtime resident in Israel from his neighborhood in Armenia), they explained the differences between what they called “thinking with your head” and “thinking with your heart.” Ignacio began by stating that in underdeveloped countries, people are more attached to thinking with your heart, and thinking with your heart keeps you down. Why?, I asked him. He answered that in Colombia you are always thinking of your family: “I have to help my mother or my brother.” Ignacio continued with his culturalist explanation: Latinos like to dress well and spend their money as part of their joyfulness, their alegría. On the other hand, Ignacio and Angelina said, Israelis are more practical and methodical, they think with their heads. They don’t throw huge parties with their savings. The elderly live alone, and after a certain age, the children are independent. To Ignacio and Angelina, that is, Israelis seem more individualistic. Further, Ignacio stated that due to Latino machismo, women are expected not to work in Colombia, while in Israel they can. In these terms, which were typical for Latinos in Israel, Ignacio blamed Latin American poverty on Latino culture. At the same time, Ignacio described his own migration as a process of adapting to thinking with his head and of toughening up—of becoming more modern and gaining new forms of agency. As he explained in an interview: “I suffered a great deal the first days [of his migration], but this made me stronger.” One example where he found himself to be hardened was with the distance he came to feel from his then wife (now estranged), something never fully resolved. “But that part has already been largely finished. And I became hard [duro] because I was never a hard person.” While Ignacio felt he had gained many economic opportunities in Israel, he was also conscious of having lost part of his self that connected to his wife and his large family of eleven siblings. This typical description of the pain of disorientation and attenuating ties with extended family led many Latinos to feel that they were at once becoming more isolated and more independent. They associated this type of personhood with modernization. For example, in 2004, as I began sustained fieldwork, I  talked to a Colombian, José, whom I had known since my earliest research in the late nineties. He saw my wedding band, and I confirmed that I was now married. “mazal tov, eize yofi!” he exclaimed in Hebrew. Then he asked whether we had any children. I told him that we need to finish our doctoral degrees first, then find work. He laughed and answered (in Spanish) that this was “very modern,” like the Israeli mentality, where you first buy an apartment, then find a job, and only then build a family. “Latin Americans do it backwards,” he joked, no doubt thinking of his own circumstances in which the birth of his first child interrupted his university studies: “First you have kids, then you get married, and only then do you try to find a way to subsist.”

46  |  Latinos in Israel Latinos experienced the shifts to a “modern” country in highly gendered ways. Many women noted that they could be much more independent in Israel, especially if they were single. In the Latin American countries from which they came, they would not feel comfortable leaving the house alone, and often complained about parents or older brothers that would watch over them. One Colombian explained that before arriving in Israel, she would never leave the house without getting ready for at least half an hour, dressing up and putting on makeup. On the other hand, in Israel, she could just leave the house in her house clothes. Many women explained also that there were no opportunities for them should they return to Latin American countries. While in Israel they could find work in their mid-thirties and forties, there would be no similar opportunities should they return. Whichever country they started out from, all agreed that most companies only looked for women in their early twenties. The modernist chronotope that helped describe the lives of Latinos in Israel could repeatedly be applied, so that anything could come to take on these characteristics of (supposedly) modern and traditional societies. Jefes in particular were important models. For example, Ignacio and Angelina invited me to a large dinner party they held in their jefes’ apartment (the jefes were away). Like Cisco in the opening anecdote, I was surprised by the meal that they served, since it contrasted in every way with what was usually served by Latinos in Israel. The dinner included many dishes that Angelina said she had learned from their jefes. Everyone was seated around the large dinner table with a full set of dinner plates and cutlery. The main dish was a roast roll of pork, oven baked and sliced rather than served with beans (frijoles). Instead of rice, Angelina made oven-baked potatoes and sweet potatoes with oregano and rosemary. In addition, they served two chilled, baked eggplants with two different sauces, and a salad of lettuce and pomegranate. Instead of beer, rum, or aguardiente (a form of liquor common in Colombia and Ecuador), they offered wine, and Ignacio constantly doted on us, refilling our glasses. With regards to the music, Angelina joked at one point that Latinos are the only ones who listen to salsa music while dining, and Ignacio responded lightly that perhaps they should put on Mozart. Later in an interview, Ignacio noted that getting used to food in Israel was actually very difficult for him, but that he later found himself put off by the food when traveling in Colombia. That is, this meal represented another means to display the changes Ignacio and Angelina had undergone as part of their migration. Their longtime employers exemplified the modern life that Ignacio and Angelina were now serving for their guests. To be clear, my point is not to suggest that Latinos were uniform in their eating habits, either in Latin America or in Israel, nor that they were uniform in assessing the indexical values of different culinary practices. Rather, like becoming accustomed to living apart from extended family, the cooking and serving of

Becoming Noncitizens | 47 a meal was another aspect of how Latinos could experience the modernization of migrating to Israel. The independence of the more “modern” self comes with a cost, however. The editorial from Latinos de Hoy cited above expressed the loss experienced when leaving one’s land, and Ignacio mentioned his sense of loss when becoming estranged from his wife. The most common answer when I asked Latinos what they had lost when migrating to Israel was “el calor de familia” (the warmth of family). Latinos linked the affective states of el calor de familia to family sociality and also to broader forms of public sociality. In the late nineties and early 2000s, Latinos did manage to partially replicate the extended families and friendship relations, as their migration chains brought more and more people from their Latin American networks to Israel. However, these networks were decimated with the raids and deportations that intensified when the Immigration Police force was established in 2002. Anita, who arrived in Israel from Quito in the mid-nineties, described the kind of family sociality that she had lost as a result of her migration. Anita maintained a fairly rich social life through her church in Tel Aviv, and yet she also felt she had gained much by moving to the Holy Land. When I asked her about what she had lost, Anita responded (in Spanish), “I have stopped living for myself.” To explain, she discussed many of the practices of family sociality that were missing for her. “At times I think I’m not the same person, in the physical attention [cuidado] for myself, in social life, in the care of family [cariño de familia].” Anita explained that she came from a very close-knit family, and that she was “the axis of that joy [alegría].” When she had lived in Quito, she would arrange invitations and decide on the social calendar. On holidays, the extended family would descend on her parents’ home in the countryside or one of the homes of the siblings. When I asked her to compare her social life in Ecuador to the many friends she had in Israel, Anita answered that friendships in Israel required more work, by which she meant that more prior coordination was involved: Here there is a bit of suspicion because of the system of life that one leads here. You have to call [in advance to ask] if I can go [to visit a friend], because from work, you return exhausted. You have to rest. . . . Here everything is, how can you say it?, that you can’t waste time. If you work, you return, doing the shopping, and you have to rest. Instead, over there [in Ecuador], you don’t worry about that.

Anita’s description was typical among Latinos, regardless of regional or ethnoracial background. The spontaneity of the social calendar, of visiting with friends, of mutual care were all reduced by Latino adults’ demanding work schedule, where every hour counted. Each week, Anita worked three days of 12–14 hours cleaning and caring for a wealthy family, two days of about 8–10 hours, and then 6–9 hours on Fridays, depending on the family’s need. Especially on her long days,

48  |  Latinos in Israel she arrived home “dragging her feet.” Another Ecuadorian, from Guayaquil, also expressed that in Ecuador she and her husband were used “to being served, not being the servants.” Being served means that they had their own domestic help, which eases the social labor of putting on dinners and receiving guests. The highly regimented work lives of Latinos in Israel left precious little time for leisure sociality among family and friends. The family sociality described by Anita was only part of the losses of leaving Latin America for Israel. From many Latinos’ descriptions, sociality extended out to public neighborhood sociality. Colombians in particular emphasized the December holidays as a time when strangers came together to celebrate. Lorenzo, from a town near Cali, had arrived in Israel in 1994 in the footsteps of a sister-in-law. Like Diego Manuel, Lorenzo was gregarious and often went to Israeli parties, and had many Israeli friends. Yet he often complained that Israeli parties are boring. In an interview, I pushed him to describe the difference (in Spanish): L: Here you don’t get that December heat [calor], of the good night, and all those things. You don’t see it. A: Which, how is that heat? L: That is very intense. That’s one of the best holidays. It’s like, here, which do you get? Purim? No. Rosh Hashanah, maybe? Not Rosh Hashanah either. Here there’s no holiday that’s like our December. . . . The streets are filled with lights, people put out their speakers, they put on music, all types of music. They kill a pig, they kill a cow. They share [the meat] with everyone. They close the streets. There’s party [rumba] and there’s drink, and there’s dancing, and there’s everything. And here there’s nothing like that! Here’s there’s no festival. That’s like a festival. Here there’s festival, but everyone—People are too sour. The people don’t form groups, they don’t associate with others. There’s few. With us, no, everyone is welcome and there’s a celebration. And there’s party and everything that you want. And there’s that familiarity between neighbors. And even neighbors from other neighborhoods arrive, they are very well received wherever they come. It’s something very special. It’s something incredible. The December holidays were a constant memory mentioned to describe how neighbors—even relative strangers—in Latin America socialize in public, and come to feel like a group that shares space and time. When I asked Lorenzo to distinguish such a December festival from the three-day raves he liked to attend in Israel, he explained that the Israeli version did not produce the same inclusion: “You go to participate together, but everyone in their own place. If each prepares a barbecue, they prepare the meat for themselves. They don’t call [to] their

Becoming Noncitizens | 49 neighbor, ‘bring me the meat, I’ll barbecue it for you.’” Lorenzo’s description was perhaps more florid than others, but everyone who described the alegría of the December festivities emphasized how relative strangers came to inhabit the ritual time together and create a public space of (supposed) inclusion. Lorenzo’s description also suggests the kinds of neighborly sociality that were missing for someone like Victor, the Colombian who left after eight weeks. In short, Latinos painted a picture of two very different types of social spaces, bisected by their migration to Israel. Before their migration, they lived among strong, mostly neighborhood-based networks of kin and friends, through which they imagined the sociality of the nation. This Latin American sociality was remembered as more spontaneous and inclusive, more alegre and calido, but also more wasteful economically, and interwoven with greater “traditional” hierarchy.25 After their migration, Latinos saw themselves living in much smaller, more randomly connected networks, whose social calendar was based on much more planning. Further, their working lives felt more regimented, leaving them far less time and energy for sociality of leisure time. The Israelis around them seemed more modern too, with more cosmopolitan habits of cuisine and dress, but also colder and less inclusive. Of course, these kinds of generalizations do not actually represent the great variety of experiences and practices found both in Latin America and in Israel. Yet they represent the dominant take on the cultural politics of modernization that helped produce a consensus among Latinos in Israel.

The Language of a Modern People Just as the modernist chronotope colored all evaluation by Latinos of their migration, it also colored their ideological evaluations of language and interactional practice. In particular, Latinos described the difference between how Latin Americans talk and how Israelis talk as part of the general chronotopic divide. These descriptions informed a language ideology about the cultural differences between Latinos and Israelis, and how those differences marked Spanish and Hebrew.26 Israeli practices and ideas about their interactional directness are a kind of cultural intimacy—a representation of national culture that may contradict officially sanctioned expressions and come off as embarrassing (Herzfeld 2005; Shryock 2004b).27 Israelis often speak of themselves as blunt and full of chutzpah. Both the practices of directness and their rationalizations directly impacted Latinos. Latinos conceived these Israeli self-characterizations as part of the disorienting shock of migration, but also as something that Latinos need to emulate as part of grounding themselves in Israel and becoming modern. That is, the engagement with Israeli directness became a part of understanding their migration in terms of cultural difference, and one that led many Latinos to conclude that Israeli interactional practices were more modern and inherently agentive.

50  |  Latinos in Israel Diego Manuel, who taught Spanish in a popular Tel Aviv adult language institute, related the following anecdote about his last class of the year with three different groups of Israeli students.28 He explained to each class that Latin Americans speak very alegre, and that they are a very alegre people. Diego Manuel asked each class what word describes how Israelis speak, and according to him, in all three instances the answer was xutspa, chutzpah, audacity or impudence. This interaction between the Latin American guide to, and the Israeli consumers of, Latin American culture brings into relief strong language ideologies. In general, Latinos ended up adopting Israeli ideas about interactional practices, namely that Israelis are very direct to the point of bluntness when interacting, and that they are very excitable. Latinos would often offer explanations of Israelis’ behavior that relied on these terms. Moreover, Latinos felt transformed by the exposure to these Israeli practices, including a sense of gaining greater agency. The shock of Israeli interactional directness was legion among Latinos. This shock was part of the stories about the disorientation that were caused by migration. Diego Manuel, for example, was fond of telling one such story. Upon first arriving in Israel, he lived with his cousins, who sent him out to buy bread after teaching him the precise phrase ani rotse lexem, “I want bread.” He practiced this phrase in his head all the way to the store. However, unable to read shop signs, he ended up in a pharmacy, and upon uttering his first bit of Hebrew, he was bawled out by the shopkeeper, no doubt angry that someone would have the nerve (or chutzpah) to ask a pharmacist for bread. Or maybe the shopkeeper was not that angry but just came off as aggressive. That shocking episode was the beginning of Diego Manuel’s decision to learn Hebrew. Such episodes also helped to induce Latino stereotypes about Israeli interactional behavior. In the midst of a conversation about other matters, Diego Manuel once told me proudly that when his cellular phone contract was up for renewal, he had acted “very Israeli.” He explained that he went into a fashionable shopping mall, where two companies, Orange and Cellcom, had their stalls next to each other. After finding out about Cellcom’s deal to attract customers from other companies, he phoned Orange’s customer service to find out if they could match it. Diego Manuel felt that making the phone call in front of the Cellcom representatives, as well as negotiating the price aggressively, was part of what made his behavior so Israeli. Latinos felt the need to respond to Israeli chutzpah in kind, and many expressed how such encounters changed one’s very agency as a speaker. I spoke at length with a group of friends and flatmates about this in 2002, including a Chilean couple, a single Ecuadorian, and a married Venezuelan.29 All had been in Israel between three and ten years, and the youngest of them, the Chilean woman, Ester, had arrived when she was fourteen with her mother, and had completed a high school diploma. During our conversation, I asked them questions

Becoming Noncitizens | 51 about how they got along speaking with Israelis, and they mostly answered with stories about employers. We ended up on the subject of getting paid. The group agreed that problems of pay were one kind of interaction where insufficient Hebrew ability led to problems. In this context, Enrique, a thirty-something Venezuelan, voiced a general theme about gaining the respect of Israelis, here using the ethnonym judío (Jew). In his description of the problems with Jewish employers, Enrique used culturalist terms, rather than blaming the hierarchical relation of employer and worker (in Spanish): Here one thing works. I don’t know if you know this. The Jew tests you, and takes you to the extreme. That is, if he sees that you lower your head, he will always step on you. If he sees that you defend yours as right, he’s going to respect you.

Enrique followed this observation with a lengthy story about his travails opening a bank account as an unauthorized resident, where he had to return three times to the branch and endure several unpleasant interactions with a clerk before achieving the desired result. The point for Enrique was that he had not given in to Israeli behavior. Latinos experienced answering Israelis in kind as transformative. They often described the way they answered Israelis as losing shame or of showing an unexpected insolence. As the conversation continued, one of the Chileans, Rodrigo, told a story about how he had defended his seat on a bus from a would-be Israeli usurper (discussed in detail in Paz 2015b, 153–56). In the story, Rodrigo emphasized that he had not shown embarrassment in aggressively answering the Israeli’s impertinent questions. His wife, Ester, commented afterwards how she can speak differently in Israel than the way she spoke in Chile before her arrival. Her confidence emanated not only from knowing Hebrew very well, but also from her showing no shame: For me Hebrew makes me feel also— . . . Perhaps because I know it, I know it well, it makes me feel confident, y’know? Anything which they say to me, I already answer it, y’know? I tell them, “look, this matters to me.” And if they say something to me I answer them the same. But otherwise let’s say in Spanish, dunno, I’d be like—Or when I was in my country, I’d feel something like shame. But not here. Here it’s like your shame goes away [se te quita la vergüenza].

When I asked Ester for an example of what she meant by losing shame, she gave the example of Rodrigo’s defense of his bus seat. As in the examples above, the migration bisects Ester’s biography and shapes a new self, one that can become less ashamed. Back in “my country,” she would feel embarrassed at speaking like Rodrigo on the bus, but not in Israel. As part of adopting Israeli interactional practices and ideologies, Latinos tended to conflate the language of Israel, Hebrew, with the stereotyped

52  |  Latinos in Israel interactional norms of directness and chutzpah. Ester stood out because, in our conversation, she actually managed to separate the two when she discussed that she did not have to be aggressive when talking to her boss: Because they [my bosses] treat me well, y’know? So I don’t have any reason to be aggressive. That is, it isn’t the language [Hebrew]. Rather it’s according to how people talk to you. So you answer them as well, how they treat you, y’know?

As I’ll discuss in the next chapter, such distinctions were often elided, and Israeli Hebrew and Israeli directness and chutzpah were often perceived as the same. To respond in kind, to lose shame, and to feel the distinction of Latino and Israeli interactional practices meant that any time a Latino engages an Israeli can be a moment in which the politics of culture plays out. Moreover, these political processes could even play out between Latinos, for example between parents and children. Just as Diana Laura and Ignacio speak about the great pains of migration, and associate it with the process of becoming modern, so many Latinos feel part of this pain coming from their engagement with Israeli interactional practices, especially with chutzpah. At the same time, as with Diego Manuel’s negotiation of his new cell phone contract, to start speaking like Israelis could give Latinos a sense that they not only gained a new form of agency but also shared in the cultural intimacy of Israel.

Conclusion Latinos as a group paid a price for the economic security gained through migrating to Israel. They paid in monetary terms, by buying expensive tour packages to pass through the border inspection. They paid also in kinship terms, by seeing their familial lives disrupted by the enormous distance they traveled. And many felt they paid in terms of their ability to participate in the domestic and public lives they had once lived. They gave up the ability to communicate with greater fluency and with the warmth they felt not only among family but also in the public celebrations that blurred family, neighborhood, and nation. Tied to  the  global political economic processes that made their lives so precarious before the migration, these losses gave Latinos a sense of lacking agency. Becoming a noncitizen was accompanied by losing a great deal. Yet becoming a noncitizen was also accompanied by incremental capacities that eventually could become a claim to citizenship. At what point did these capacities begin to form? As soon as someone passed through the Israeli border inspection, they could count on finding some housing and work through family and acquaintances. Even a pioneer like Diana Laura, arriving without knowing a soul, managed to find an initial work placement, if only by chance. Such pioneers then set the pattern for further migration: sponsoring family members with loans

Becoming Noncitizens | 53 and help to get settled. Further, a good jefe could mediate for Latinos, helping them with schools, housing, and the like. At each phase, responding to Israelis—and thus also acquiring Israeli interactional practices—shaped how Latinos gained these capacities. Gaining capacities to make claims to citizenship is an incremental process, one which is mediated at every moment by language and interactional practices. Becoming a noncitizen and becoming a citizen are thus not easily separated. In the next chapter, I follow the way that the publicness of Israel is tangled in the more intimate lives of Latinos, and marks even the distinction made between Spanish and Hebrew.

Notes 1. Diego Manuel and his partner were among the few beneficiaries of a batch of reforms that a secular Minister of Interior had introduced in opposition to religious parties which did not recognize same-sex partnership (see Paz 2016 for more on this government minister). 2. Later that week, Diego Manuel asked me to help him find Spanish-language equivalents for a couple of Hebrew verbs, lefargen (to encourage, to be supportive without grudge or jealousy) and lehitxarfen (to freak out). It seems that these were two examples that had crossed him up while he was visiting Colombia. For the latter, we agreed on volverse loco or enloquecer; for the former, we had a much harder time. The use Diego Manuel wanted was as in the common phrase lama ata lo mefargen? (why can’t you say something nice?). The best we could do is por qué no puedes decir algo bueno? 3. Diego Manuel arrived in Israel at the age of eighteen and spoke no Hebrew at the time. 4. Trade jargons of this type are typically simplified registers that are used for economic activities between participants who treat each other as outsiders. That is, no one treats a trade jargon register as their native language, or as a complete language. The term “jargon,” of course, is also used for specialized vocabularies associated with professions, like legalese, computing, or military-speak. Note that this meaning of jargon shares something with the meaning of “trade jargon”: no one is supposed to treat specialized vocabularies as their domestic register, for example, when speaking with intimate others. See M. Silverstein (1972), Mathieu (2003), and Allan (2006). 5. See Comaroff and Comaroff (2012, 118–21) for a discussion of the distinction between the terms “modernity” and “modernization,” where the latter implies a normative sense of telos. 6. Dick discusses these time and space dimensions by looking at ordinary conversations among working-class Mexicans thinking of leaving for the US, who see their choice as “getting ahead” (salir adelante) in the US or living a good, ethical life (la vida bonita) in Mexico. For other useful takes on the modernist chronotope, see Koven (2013), Divita (2014), and Chávez (2015). 7. See the introduction for more discussion. 8. There is a long history of writing about Latin America as a region in ways that resist the terms of an occidentalist capitalist perspective, including the development of dependency theory and theories of neo-imperialism, e.g., Frank (1967), Wallerstein (1974), Halperín Donghi (1993), and Coronil (1997).

54  |  Latinos in Israel 9. There are many arguments about what exactly is driving the sense of economic dispossession felt by this global class, of which the Latin Americans who arrived in Israel are a part. For example, some would argue that it is new kinds of global capital incursions and abandonment or new political policies that do away with state welfare protections. Such questions go beyond the scope of this book, but I agree with the position that the mobility of these Latin Americans must be understood on global scales of analysis. For important contemporary contributions in that vein, see for example Harvey (2003), Sassen (2010), Hart (2015), and Ferguson (2015). 10. For useful discussions of agency, especially at the intersection of language, see Ahearn (2001a, 2001b), Duranti (1990, 1993, 2004), Keane (1997, 2003), Mahmood (2001a, 2001b), and Meneley (2007). 11. One longtime Colombian resident once spoke with shock when she heard me speak of the poverty of some Jewish residents of Israel. She had never considered that there were poor Jews, even though she lived in a neighborhood of many working-class, mostly Mizrahi Jews. She associated her neighbors with their ethnonyms, like Yemeni, Iraqi, and Moroccan. In Israel, such ethnonyms refer to the racialized descent of Mizrahi Jews. 12. Later, more of Andrea’s family would arrive, similarly fearing for their lives. 13. Cisco explained that he was married only “civilly” with his wife, and therefore would be able to marry by the church to gain Spanish residence. I am not sure if this was the case or not. Cisco did not mention what would happen in this scenario to his sister’s daughter, whom they cared for. 14. The literature on these settlers is voluminous; see for example Shafir (1989), Zerubavel (1995), and Neumann (2011). Hirsch (2015, 304–6) has a good review. 15. Some classics in the sociology of migration are Portes and Bach (1985), Massey (1987), Massey et al. (1987), and Massey et al. (1993). 16. She and her sisters living in Israel counted that their immediate kin who came numbered 35 members at their peak, and she also brought friends, who in turn brought others. 17. Bakhtin (1981b, 86–129) famously analyzed such narratives of chance meetings and contingent outcomes in the ancient Greek travel tales, the Greek romance, and the adventure time built into the device of travel along a road. Transformations to the life course of the protagonist occur as a result of these encounters. Likewise, in Diana Laura’s narrative, her “road” opens up when she first sees an advertisement, then goes to the employment agency where she meets another kind of character. Then she meets people in Tel Aviv who help her get out of the airport, find a job, realize that she is working too hard, and eventually learn English. 18. She was not told why, but it seems like others who were detained were also Colombians (including people who had previously worked in Israel). In general, when Colombians recounted stories of detainment and search at border crossings, it was due to suspicions of drug trafficking. 19. During the First Gulf War, Iraq launched Scud missiles that landed in Israeli cities. It is remembered by many Israelis as a particular frightening time in which they went down into bomb shelters and wore gas masks. Very few missiles actually hit their mark. 20. The Santander neighborhood was infamous for its poverty and crime, according to those who came from there. 21. I was not able to get an interview with this apical pioneer.

Becoming Noncitizens | 55 22. See chapter 3 for an example of this gratitude, where I describe Diego Manuel’s speech during La Escuelita’s Festival. 23. In the early 2000s, Knesset members worried about labor migrant children who did not have health insurance, and they worked out a plan through one of the health maintenance organizations (HMOs). This plan was offered to any labor migrant on the basis of a monthly payment of around 200 NIS, or about US$44. 24. One of the biggest surprises for Latinos was the great leeway given to Israeli children, whether allowing them to speak back to their parents (see chap. 2), or allowing teenagers to smoke marijuana or to have lovers overnight. 25. See chapter 2 for more on how Latinos conceived of their Latin American countries of origin as rife with “traditional” forms of hierarchy. 26. Language ideologies are part of a general reflexivity about how language is used, including rationalizations and beliefs that make social differences integral to explaining differences in interactional practice. See the introduction for a discussion of the analytic term “language ideology,” and see chapter 2 for more examples. 27. “Cultural intimacy” is a concept developed mostly by Michael Herzfeld as an anthropological response to Benedict Anderson’s (1991) thematization of community for the study of nationalism. Herzfeld focuses on the tension between official and popular representations of national culture. Andrew Shryock usefully (re)introduces the question of mass mediation, which expands the term in productive ways, and returns it to a foundational question for Anderson in Imagined Communities. 28. Diego Manuel was able to do this due to his legal residence status. The institute, called maxon leyedidut amerika (translated as the American Alliance Institute), trades on middle-class Israeli desires for extended travels to exotic regions, with Latin America, South Asia, and Southeast Asia being the most popular destinations (see Noy 2007). In 2005, the institute’s teachers were mostly Jewish immigrants from Latin America, with the exception of Diego Manuel and one other non-Jewish immigrant, a Cuban, who similarly had status because of his common-law relation with an Israeli. The institute is situated in the trendy area around Tel Aviv’s Cinemathèque, and is decorated with Latin American country flags and various posters reminding its students of major tourist destinations. It attracted Israelis in their twenties and thirties with a predilection for Latin American–styled commodities. 29. They were all members of the same Evangelical Christian church in Tel Aviv, which, as part of religious observance, emphasized living with other Evangelicals to maintain the sanctity of their lives.

2 Strangers in Their Own Home Educación, Domesticity, and Transnational Intimacy

I

n September 2007, I was visiting the family of José and Clara, conducting interviews about the difficulty Latino parents in Israel felt they had with their children, especially with maintaining Latin American practices of showing respect. José had been in Israel almost fifteen years, having arrived at the age of thirty from Colombia, and Clara and their older son joined him about ten months later. Their daughter, Zoe, was born in Israel, and was ten years old in 2007. After I interviewed both parents and her older brother, Zoe became fairly cranky. As she prepared her things for school, she realized that José had forgotten to buy her a special bag she needed for art class the next day. Speaking in soothing tones, in Spanish, José sought for several minutes to mollify his irritated daughter with promises to buy the bag soon.1 He also suggested she tell the teacher that it was her father’s fault she arrived at class without the bag. Alas, to no avail. Zoe continued complaining and whimpering unabated until José lost patience and yelled in Hebrew: “kvar eyn tik, ani lo kone!” “there’s no more bag, i’m not buying it!”

Then, after a brief pause, he added in a less adamant tone and in Spanish: “si quiere de forma grosera” “if you want it in a rude way”2

The move to Hebrew—as well as the return to Spanish to comment on the Hebrew words—with the change in intonation and volume, and even in body posture, are complex and reinforcing shifts that occurred routinely in Latino interpersonal interactions in Israel. These two lines also show how the voice of the (Jewish-)Israeli outsider—one Latinos associate especially with stranger sociality—constantly appears and ripples across Latino domestic space. This chapter examines how the voice of the Israeli outsider manifests itself in Latino homes and challenges the boundary between Latino and Israeli. Two forms of intimacy are at play in these dynamics: as a form of national publicness and as a form of informality.3 At the time of my fieldwork, and

Strangers in Their Own Home  |  57 probably today as well, if you asked any Latino in Israel, they would tell you that what separates Latinos from Israelis is educación. By educación, Latinos mean (in this context) a cultivated ethic of conduct toward others that is respectful, one that is ultimately displayed by a combination of interactional practices generally discussed by scholars of language under the rubric of politeness (e.g., P. Brown and Levinson 1987; Watts 2003). In these politeness frameworks, interacting with respect for others involves attention to ensuring no loss of “face” among one’s interlocutors. Alongside the Spanish descriptor educación, younger Latinos also used the commensurate Hebrew term xinux. Showing respect to others is, at a second order, a sign of one’s own refinement and status (Errington 1988; M. Silverstein 1979, 217–27; 2003). This use of educación for describing the conduct of moral personhood is not the same as formal schooling or education, although formal schooling and middle-class standing are often woven together in Latino ideas about exemplary educación. Moreover, Latinos consider educación as conduct that is cultivated in the intimacy of family domestic space, and thus its inculcation is an important part of the socialization of children. While Latinos judge educación to be at the core of a person, they also take it as an indexical sign of the family’s transnational lineage and breeding. Latinos in Israel expect children to honor the sacred relation with their parents, and especially their mothers, by displaying educación in interaction. The stakes involved, as I will show below, are not only about respecting the sanctity of family life. Latinos see educación—and the parental authority it props up—as important to making sure children do not fall into dangerous life courses, like crime. For Latinos, the very success of the migration to Israel is at stake in parents’ ability to maintain direction over their children’s behavior. At the same time, Latinos consider educación, much more than a knowledge of Spanish, to distinguish them from Israelis. Latinos were uncertain that Spanish was shared by all of them, especially since most younger Latinos had imperfect competence in their parents’ repertoires of Latin American Spanish registers, and in some cases, Latino children and youth knew Spanish only passively. In contrast, as part of their language ideological view, Latinos considered educación to be what they all shared, and what set them apart. To overstate the case somewhat, Latinos considered themselves to have educación, and considered most Israelis to lack it. Latinos both marveled at and recoiled from how bluntly Israeli children address parents, and also at what they observed Israeli parents (often employers) to allow from their children. That is, the very practices that many Israelis associate with cultural intimacy—being blunt and familiar with each other and minimizing formal hierarchy in familial interaction—were often perceived by Latinos as displaying a lack of educación.4 To Latinos, Israeli families allow children to conduct themselves toward parents as the children would interact with each

58  |  Latinos in Israel other in the street.5 To put it crudely, Latinos felt that Israelis assumed too much familiarity, or confianza. Israelis too quickly assumed an informal intimacy that seemed overreaching to many Latinos. In their discussions and stories, Latinos stereotyped Israelis as too aggressive, and as breeding children that did not know how to behave. Unexpectedly, this mostly negative evaluation that Israelis lack educación did not mean that Latinos uniformly rejected Israeli (lack of) educación. Further, although the ideology of difference was very strong, when pressed, Latinos were not always able to clearly put their finger on the exact difference in interactional practices. The instability of binaries like Latino/Israeli, Spanish/Hebrew, or speaking with/without educación produced great ambivalence and anxiety. Latinos themselves saw that they do not maintain the boundaries of these binaries in practice: they sometimes—or was it often?—spoke like Israelis instead of like Latin Americans, and often mixed the supposedly distinct languages Hebrew and Spanish. It was not even easy for them to agree what it means in Israel to behave like a Latin American. To top it off, at times, Israeli directness seemed to them more modern educación, and adult Latinos wondered if their own children could learn something from Israelis. These assessments played out constantly in Latino interactions and encased the distinction between Hebrew and Spanish. José’s Spanish comment on his Hebrew line displays a typical reflexivity produced by language use (Lucy 1993b; Agha 2007a; Kockelman 2010b). It was common, although not necessary, to use Hebrew to represent a mode of self-expressive positioning (or footing, see below) in Latino intimate contexts, where the “face” of one’s interlocutor was not treated as in need of protection.6 If Latinos generally associated self-expressive interactional practices with Israeli voices, José’s response to Zoe shows how the outsider comes to inhabit Latino intimate sociality: this Israeli outsider can emerge laminated to the very person of Latinos in their own homes, emerging from the mouths of adults and children almost unbidden. Although the cultural politics of Israeli citizenship was not directly at issue, aspects of Israeli publicness were constantly playing out in Latino homes. In other words, Israeli stranger sociality recursively came to appear in Latino inner sphere contexts, unsettling the boundary between outsider and insider, stranger and familiar.7 The constant erosion of these boundary suggested to Latinos that maybe they were not entirely different from Israelis, not entirely from someplace else, but perhaps also somehow from Israel. This chapter examines Latino reflexivity about educación as it was shown in their practices of using language in their own homes, as well as their discussions of these practices. I discuss the ways that Latinos compared Latin America as a (supposedly) “traditional” society in contrast to the (supposed) “modernity” of Israel. That is, in their most intimate interactions, Latinos were constantly

Strangers in Their Own Home  |  59 making transnational comparisons—sometimes consciously, often semi- or unconsciously—about how they spoke. In doing so, they found themselves drawn toward a modern horizon, where Israeli interactional practices seemed like the future.

Educación and the Distinction between Hebrew and Spanish When I asked them explicitly, Latinos showed a great degree of ideological consensus on one matter: Latinos always stated that they had better educación than their Israeli peers. This judgment was as consistent from Latino youth, who had grown up entirely or mostly in Israel, as it was from Latino adults, who had arrived from Latin America. When considering Latino children in particular, all Latinos agreed that Latino kids interacted with their parents and other adults with much more educación than Israeli kids did in parallel contexts. This ideological statement was constant across my ethnography, as well as in 67 interviews that looked at language use. (I say “ideological” to emphasize that their statements did not necessarily translate clearly into practice.) Latinos were especially adamant that what they saw among employers’ children or friends— the xutspa or chutzpah of Israeli children toward their parents—was not to be seen among Latino children. However, when pressed to describe the difference, it was not always clear to them that Latinos, especially Latino kids growing up in Israel, were all that different. Importantly, Latinos felt that they had trouble keeping an Israeli voice out of their homes. They had trouble establishing the authority of their domestic space over the behavior of children growing up in Israel. These considerations affected how Latinos distinguished between Spanish and Hebrew. When he lost his patience, José shifted his interactional position, moving from the role of the soothing, patient, and apologetic father to one that was angry and even threatening a punitive decision (to not buy the bag). This shift in interactional roles is signaled in multiple ways: intonation, volume, body position, and of course using Hebrew instead of Spanish. Such shifts have long been analyzed by scholars of language as “code-switching,” meaning that the language is changed for some interactional effect.8 However, as leading scholars have constantly reminded us, not all code-switches are equal, in part because participants during an interaction do not necessarily patrol language boundaries in ways we might expect. There are times when the switch in language is not very meaningful, and times when it is not clear which language is being used. Sometimes speakers even intentionally blur the boundary between languages (Errington 1998; Woolard 1998). This lack of clarity can lead to assessments of “mixing” languages—which strengthens the faulty assumption that languages are “pure” until mixed. Further, “mixed” varieties and registers (like Spanglish or Chinglish) are often stigmatized, even by people who speak them.9

60  |  Latinos in Israel Yet as in the example of José speaking to Zoe, Latinos in Israel can use Hebrew to produce a shift in interaction. To discuss these kinds of interactional shifts, linguistic anthropologists (e.g., M. Silverstein 1993; Wortham 2001; Agha 2005) have taken the term “footing” from sociologist and anthropologist Erving Goffman. By footing, Goffman means the way that participation is framed in a given interaction: “A change in footing implies a change in the alignment we take up to ourselves and the others present as expressed in the way we manage the production or reception of an utterance” (1979, 5).10 Certain footings taken up by bilingual speakers, like José’s move from an apologetic to an angry father, can use a change in language (from Spanish to Hebrew) to help produce the change in alignment. Such a use of Hebrew can, within Latino contexts, help to emphasize its distinction from Spanish. In bilingual settings like Latino domestic interactions, the interactional footing is more important than the seemingly obvious historical distinction between Hebrew and Spanish. As in many bilingual speech communities, new varieties or registers of languages were emerging and breaking down the distinction between Hebrew and Spanish. For Latinos, shifts in footing helped to associate Hebrew with displays of self-centered rudeness. In his work on Indonesia, Joseph Errington (1998) distinguished uses of Indonesian or Javanese registers in producing different kinds of footings. In particular, Errington suggestively discussed how different registers of Javanese and of so-called mixed usage of Javanese and Indonesian relate to politeness and personhood. Errington distinguished self-expressive and other-oriented modes of using different registers, which apply well to the context of Latino bilingual communication in Israel.11 These modes are relative and operate on a continuum, rather than being discrete and bounded. The self-expressive mode makes the speaker or speakers seem less concerned about the effects of their turn at talk on other participants in the interaction: they do not seem concerned about showing respect to their interlocutor or referent. Speakers in this mode can seem more spontaneous, unpolished or unrefined, as if not wearing a mask over what is treated as an inner self.12 (I emphasize that although it seems this way, I do not posit that a true inner self somehow exists outside of the communicative event.) Israeli straight talk (described in the introduction) is a prime example of self-expressive modes of interacting. In contrast, other-oriented modes of interacting can make the speakers seem more refined, as if they are taking greater care in expressing themselves, and as if they are more attentive to the effect on other participants. Latinos in Israel, and especially older Latinos who were raised in Latin America, were very sensitive to the distinction of self-expressive and other-oriented modes of interacting. To use an other-oriented mode was generally called “giving respect” (dar respeto),

Strangers in Their Own Home  |  61 while the self-expressive mode in certain contexts could result in being judged as “lacking respect” (falta de respeto). (The use of the verb dar [give] was part of a more general metapragmatic terminology using verbs of exchange to describe the reciprocity of interaction, especially between children and their parents.) To complicate matters, older Latinos felt that the difference between self-expressive and other-oriented footings was not clear in Israel. They were only certain that it was different from what they remembered to be the case in their Latin American places of origin. That is, older Latinos used a complex transnational calculus to figure out what educación meant for them in Israel. When Latinos were making a distinction between Hebrew and Spanish—and sometimes they clearly were not—Hebrew could be used for more self-expressive footings, and Spanish for more other-oriented footings. Besides language choice, the self-expressive footing was signaled through a number of devices: more direct talk, more emphatic utterance contours, less attention to violating participants’ sense of face, and little attention to marking social hierarchies between participants. Further, the self-expressive mode was most strongly associated with a (metapragmatic) stereotype about Israeli children.13 Israeli children were thought to be irrepressible: they could even insult their own parents, speaking like a stranger in their own homes. In contrast, other-oriented footing could be signaled not only by using Spanish but also by using less directness, by attention to hierarchies and participants’ sense of face, and by speaking with alegre (joyous) intonation contours.14 The stereotype typically invoked here was not one of childhood, but rather of the strict and even authoritarian Latin American parent—one who was presented as existing mostly in the diasporic homeland, and one who probably could not exist in Latino Israel. Hebrew and Spanish then were ideologically connected to figures of personhood both in Israel and in Latin America: when the distinction was maintained, Hebrew was treated as the language of the headstrong child, and Spanish as the language of the strict Latin American parent. The domestic scene of Latinos, like the opening example of José and Zoe, became a site of encounter, where the question of insider and outsider, showing familiarity or distance, was constantly at stake. Did Zoe incur this shift by acting too much like the stereotyped Israeli child? It seems so. The use of Hebrew with the establishment of self-expressive footing, and the equally common use of Spanish with other-oriented footing, made the two languages seem distinct, and even act like register alternants (that is, contrasting sets of linguistic forms). In other words, as with honorific registers of a single language (Agha 1998; Haviland 1979; Irvine 1990; M. Silverstein 2003), it was possible to say equivalent words in both languages but with different (nonreferential) interactional effects. As with all register phenomena (Agha 2007a), the sensitivity to these differences in interactional effects provokes certain kinds of reflexivity. Although there was not a perfect consensus on

62  |  Latinos in Israel this, for many Latinos, simply to make an utterance in Spanish would seem to express more educación than the equivalent or translated utterance in Hebrew. For a few Latinos, especially of an older generation, no educación could be displayed using Hebrew: the language itself seemed to lack any possibility of educación. In other words, they maintained a (Herderian) language ideology in which the Hebrew language took on characteristics associated with the interactional behavior of Israelis, while the Spanish language took on characteristics associated with the behavior of Latinos.15 Within Latino domestic life, the distinction between Hebrew and Spanish was ultimately made on the basis of perceiving educación, rather than through the apparent distinctions between standard languages. The stakes involved in making these distinctions between Hebrew and Spanish, between speaking with or without educación, were not trivial. Latino adults were not only worried about respect for the sanctity of family. Latino adults worried about their ability to maintain their children’s respect for their authority, and to be able to guide their children through the treacherous terrain of social mobility. Latinos’ socioeconomic and political marginalization was aggravated by their noncitizen status, and by the constant fear of deportation. Yet the success of migrating to Israel was predicated on finding a path to economic security if not upward mobility. Latinos therefore took educación very seriously. These stakes were probably behind José’s angry remarks in Hebrew to Zoe. His utterance seemed to have its intended effect, at least partially. Zoe stopped complaining and went to watch TV in her parents’ room. A few minutes later, still visibly irritated, she came out to ask for the remote control in Hebrew, eyfo hashalat (“where’s the remote?”) in a curt tone, and without using polite formulae like “please.” When she left, José turned to me to say that this was an example of the strong tone (tono fuerte) which Israeli kids use. No doubt our interview and the talk about the differences between Latinos and Israelis was still fresh in his mind. In the interview, he had mentioned that Latinos often tried to get their children to speak respectfully to their parents: “but no, here [in Israel] that doesn’t work. It’s very difficult because although that’s how the person is treated, it’s the daily living of this place.” With these words José repeated one of the most common complaints made by Latinos: although Latinos treat children with educación, the “daily living of this place”—from Israeli schools to the ordinary encounters with strangers in the street, and so on—undermined their efforts. Parents and caregivers anguished about how they could counteract the effects of children’s daily interaction outside the house. Latino parents perceived Israeli sociality in their children, and ironically, like José, they found themselves responding in kind. The irony is that to reestablish his parental authority, and to create the conditions for educating his daughter, José found himself drawing

Strangers in Their Own Home  |  63 on the self-expressive mode associated with Israeli interactional practices. José found himself acting in the role of the stranger in his own home. When they were addressed by their own kids without the signs of Latin American educación, Latino parents found themselves—at times against their own intentions— expressing themselves in ways closer to Israeli (lack of?) educación. As we’ll see, the further irony is that what seems like a stranger sociality can become a new form of intimacy for Latinos. The self-expressive footing associated with Israeli kids can start to seem for Latinos—even Latinos critical of Israeli educación—unvarnished familiarity. In interviews where Latinos were asked to judge excerpts of recorded conversations, many used the term confianza (trust, familiarity) to explain why it might seem that a Latino child was not speaking in accordance with ideological stereotypes.16 For Latinos, the distinction between self-expressiveness due to confianza and self-expressiveness due to Israeli stranger sociality could not be maintained clearly. Thus, behavior judged by some to be a little too “Israeli” could blur into confianza. At times, Latinos simply saw themselves as part of larger Israeli society, with its self-expressive cultural intimacy. At times, that is, Latinos began to experience themselves as part of Israel through their ordinary communication at home.

Comparing Domestic Intimacy Educación in Spanish also means “education” in the formal sense, that is, “schooling,” and the etymological connection between the meanings of acquiring school education and of behaving in refined ways is very much alive in the ideas Latino parents have about parenting.17 However, Latinos did not experience educación in Israel on the basis of Latin American–based class differences, but rather on the basis of their own marginalization in Israel. The discussion of educación came up in comparing the different practices of domestic interactions they witnessed, whether at work (in the case of adults) or at the homes of friends (in the case of youth). To define educación, Latinos spoke in a genre of commentary dealing with different intimate spheres, including Israeli domestic interactions, their own interactions in Israel, and the interactions they had in Latin America before leaving. Complex transnational comparisons were made in this genre which I dub “comparative domestic intimacy.” This constant comparison of domestic, intimate interactions produced a common type of reflection in which Latinos represented the thoughts and speech of themselves and of others. That is, in telling stories about typical kinds of interactions, Latinos stereotyped the voices of characters in their social world in Israel. These stories were common in conversation, but I would also hear them frequently when I conducted more formal recorded interviews. For example, in a 2006 interview conducted in Hebrew, I asked Emmanuel whether Latino kids showed more respect to their parents than Israeli kids. Emmanuel, who was

64  |  Latinos in Israel fifteen at the time, immediately agreed that this was true. He then represented discursively his own thoughts when he would see his (Jewish-)Israeli friends interact with their own parents: Excerpt 2.1 Emmanuel Compares Himself to His Israeli Friends 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

E: ken yesh li xaverim she’ani, ke’ilu ani ro’e otam ex hem mitnahagim lahorim veke’ilu ata omer le’atsmexa “et ze ani baxayim lo hayiti ose le’ima sheli” “lo hayiti omer la dvarim ka’ele” AP: ken? lemashal ma hem omrim? E: lo zoxer axshav aval lefamim kaze mekalelim otam mehatsad lo rotsim lehiyot itam kvar sheyazvu oto besheket ha’ele veze kol miney shtuyot AP: ken? E: ken ze dvarim she’ata ke’ilu lo omer ke’ilu afilu lo xoshev aleyhem ke’ilu ze ima shelxa hi hevi’a otxa la’olam ata tsarix letet la et hakavod shehi tsrixa

E: yes i have friends that i, like i see them how they behave toward their parents and, like, you say to yourself “that’s something i would never do to my mom” “i wouldn’t say things like that to her” AP: yes? for example what do they say? E: i don’t remember now but sometimes they kinda curse them [parents] behind their backs don’t want to be with them anymore that those ones should leave him alone and so on all kinds of nonsense AP: yes? E: yes those are things that you, like, don’t say, like you don’t even think about them, like it’s your mother she brought you to the world you need to give her the respect that she needs

In this excerpt from an interview, Emmanuel is not only giving me an ideological explanation about how one should show respect to one’s mother. He is also stereotyping the difference between Latino kids and Israeli kids in what he situates as typical domestic interaction. He does this by representing the different kinds of utterances associated with each kind of kid. He moves from Latino to Israeli kid, and then to how the Latino kid might answer her or his Israeli friend. First, there is the voice of the Latino kid, expressing shock from the outside at how her or his friends behave (lines 2 to 5). This kind of surprise is not unlike the surprise and shock represented by Latino adults as part of the disorientation of migrating to Israel (see chap. 1). This Latino kid is represented through internal monologue in lines 3 to 5: “that’s something I would never do to my mom,” and so on. The Israeli kid is drawn out when I ask him for an example (line 6). Emmanuel first says he cannot think of one, but then starts to give some general

Strangers in Their Own Home  |  65 examples: his Israeli friends might curse their parents behind their backs (line 8). Lines 9 and 10, although Emmanuel does not explicitly present them as quoted speech, begin to take on features of quoted speech. Emmanuel even uses a bit of “mock shouting” intonation to set off these lines, embedding the self-expressive utterances that his Israeli friends might make.18 That is, Emmanuel is suggesting that Israeli kids might shout “I don’t want to be with you anymore!” or “Leave me alone!” at their parents. Or perhaps he is suggesting that his friends might say these things about their parents when talking to each other, outside of parental earshot.19 These self-expressive utterances are the ones that Emmanuel represents as being what he would never do. (Of course, what Emmanuel actually did in practice is another issue altogether.) Toward the end of his answer, Emmanuel lays out the crux of educación as a sacred relation between parent and child, and for Latinos in Israel, especially between mother and child. In lines 15–19, Emmanuel returns to presenting the voice of the Latino kid, one who understands the “asymmetrical reciprocity” (Shohet 2013) of parenting, where parents made a great sacrifice that cannot be repaid but requires respect in return. Emmanuel drives home the deontic point that “you” should never say such things, or even think them. In lines 17 to 19, Emmanuel explains what a young person received from their mother— life itself—and therefore what one owes her—respect. Importantly, Emmanuel explains this as if he is answering the Israeli friends who make the harsh self-expressive utterances he describes in lines 8 to 10. He addresses a generic “you,” with commentary on how “you” should behave. Lines 17 to 19 include other-oriented formulations (in Hebrew) that he certainly heard often from his own mother or other Latino adults, in Spanish. As he presents his judgment of his Israeli friends, he assimilates the voice of the imperious Latino parent to his own. When discussing issues of respeto and educación, Latino kids would often attribute their formulations to their parents, for instance, saying “like my mom always told me.” In other words, Emmanuel maintained a distinction between Latino kids and Israeli kids by invoking the latent figure of the Latino parent. Emmanuel’s self is clearly demarcated from the Israeli other in his figuration of these characters. The intimacy of the Israeli child—rude, irrepressible, given to strong-headed self-expressiveness—can represent the stranger in Latino domestic contexts. Although Latino kids could produce such figurations with ease, and most were convinced of their accuracy, the Israeli child would sometimes—or was it often?— leap out of Latino kids when they were interacting with their own parents.20 As José said when Zoe asked for the remote control, Latino parents felt they could not completely keep the Israeli form of interacting out of their own kids. The stories that inform this mode of reflexivity were, it is important to repeat, regularly told by Latinos to one another, and are not simply an artifice

66  |  Latinos in Israel of the interview situation. Latinos reflected on educación precisely by invoking these stereotyped figures in stories of comparative domestic intimacy. Lack of educación was generally attributed to Israeli children speaking to their parents. Yet this lack of educación—or was it the Israeli child herself?—constantly appeared in Latino domestic interactions as well. And was it a lack of educación, or was it a more “modern” way to reciprocate? Latinos themselves were not always sure. To examine why, I will now turn to how the practices evaluated with the term educación were comprehended within modernization narratives.

Modernizing Educación Transnationally Latinos were fond of saying that la educación empieza en la casa: “educación begins at home.” They would say this, for example, when they observed someone else’s child behave badly and they wanted to comment on the parents. The child’s behavior was judged as an indexical likeness (or an indexical icon) of her parent’s educación.21 To put it another way, how children display respeto in interaction is not only indexical (at a second order) of their own educación, but it is also indexical of their parents’ educación and the parent’s ability to instill educación. Educación is thus understood intergenerationally, and ultimately it is judged transnationally. As José stated (see above), Latinos were unsure whether it was possible to instill (Latin American) educación in Israel. Latino parents were in agreement that educación can only really be instilled in Latin America. Latino parents saw limitations to their ability to instill educación in their children as a result of the asymmetrically reciprocal relations of parent and child. Latinos considered educación to involve moral obligations for both parents and children: parents teach children correct behavior and provide for their needs and desires, and have their sacrifices recognized by receiving respect from their children. For that reason, Israeli children’s (perceived) lack of educación was considered an indictment of Israeli parents. Any judgment of the child is therefore a judgment of the parents, and by extension the family. For Latinos in Israel, showing educación creates an indexical chain pointing back to earlier generations, and thus to the diasporic homeland. For example, in interviews, when asked to judge interactional behavior, adults often qualified their remarks by noting that different countries have different “cultures,” and perhaps así lo hacen allá, “that’s how they do it there.” As Latinos in Israel understand their descent to mean they are from elsewhere, so too does their educación point transnationally to their place of origin. No doubt due to this, when Latino adults began perceiving their children—and even themselves—speaking like Israelis, their very sense of coming from somewhere was unsettled. This spatial relation to a diasporic place of origin also has a temporal aspect. As discussed in chapter 1, Latinos tended to perceive their arrival in Israel as a move from a traditional place, from an economically underdeveloped to a modern

Strangers in Their Own Home  |  67 country with its attendant economic advantages. That is, they understood Latin America to be a place that is behind, while Israel represented a country leaning into the future. Hilary Parsons Dick (2010) has termed this understanding of space and time the “modernist chronotope.” Dick emphasizes the moral evaluations involved in this time-space framework (or chronotope): to leave home for economic opportunities in a more “advanced” country can also mean leaving behind a moral way of life. Educación likewise involved these kinds of moral judgments regarding time and space. For example, how exactly educación should be instilled was a matter of some debate, especially when it came to the question of how parents should corregir, or discipline, children. Central to this debate was to what extent spanking should be used. The more consciously old-fashioned believed that spanking was required from time to time, while others—including state-appointed educators in Israeli schools who impinged on parents’ judgment in this regard—considered this to be absolutely unnecessary, a vestige of a less enlightened time. The issue of spanking came home to Latinos through messages heard at school. Some Latino parents reported to me that their young children would threaten to call the police after hearing at school that spanking should be stopped. I also heard about a Latino pastor who was called in for a discussion at his child’s school regarding his use of spanking at home. Probably the most eloquent exponent of the “old” method of educating children was Norma, a Chilean grandmother, who had two daughters and five grandchildren in Israel, as well as two daughters and several more grandchildren living in Chile and the United States. Norma was in her sixties in 2007 and was treated with a great deal of respect by her family and close friends. For example, she was often addressed with the formality of V-forms (e.g., usted) by her daughters, son-in-law, and grandchildren, while she returned T-forms (e.g., tú). She came from a large, land-owning and fairly well-off farming family in the south of Chile and entered a convent as a young woman, where she received some formal pedagogical training before leaving. This training added some studied authority to her already dignified position of grandmother. To her way of thinking, the parent gives the child an educación, and in return the child owes the parent respeto. Disciplining the child can involve some physical punishment when necessary, by schoolteachers as well as parents. For Norma it was important that the child should obey without requiring a reward in return. The child then receives a sense of responsibility and discipline that will pass on to the next generation, and so on. Norma believed earnestly that in Israel, there was no educación, and any Latino attempts at inculcating educación at home were undone at school. Unfortunately, Norma lamented, teachers no longer are permitted to use corporal punishment, and parents are also under attack. This issue was not only

68  |  Latinos in Israel found in Israel: Norma remembered that physical punishment was already being lost in Chile before she left for Israel, where schools disseminated information against  it.22 She listed pulling hair or ears, or a sharp ruler rap to the hands, as  forms of punishment once used by teachers and parents. Without such measures, in her opinion, the moral reciprocity between parents and their children was breaking down. Her eloquent description of educación, and the difficulties of inculcating it, were part of an interview, but she launched into it before allowing me to ask a question: Excerpt 2.2 Norma describes the loss of educación 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

N: entonces son cosas que se fueron perdiendo y que los niños de hoy no saben realmente porque ellos son los reyecitos que se les da todo pero ellos no saben que tienen que dar ¿me entiendes? falta que los padres aprendan hacer padres porqueAP: para inculcarleN: para inculcarle de que no no no yo no nací con el bolso lleno de dinero para que los hijos vengan y crean que todo lo que les antoja hay que dárselo y no saben porque se lo dan como le cuesta al padre no hay un criterio formando del padre no hay criterio formado no hay para el niño un criterio de la vida de la formación que debe recibir para la responsabilidad para su educación y también para tener un camino en la vida de responsabilidad y respeto hacia los demás porque cuando somos niños chicos si nos enseñan a respetar a nuestros mayores vamos a respetar al resto del mundo

N: so these are things [corporal punishment] that were being lost and that the children of today don’t really know because they are the little kings that are given everything but they don’t know that they have to give understand? it’s necessary that parents learn to be parents becauseAP: to instillN: to instill that no no no I wasn’t born with a wallet filled with money so that the children can come and believe that everything they want you have to give to them and they don’t know why they are given what it costs the parent 23 there’s no judgment that’s forming from the parent there’s no formed judgment there’s no life judgment for the child for the formation that he needs to receive for responsibility for his education and also to have a path of responsibility in life and respect for others because when we are children if we’re taught to respect our elders we’re going to respect the rest of the world

Strangers in Their Own Home  |  69 Norma’s defense of the old methods of inculcating educación ties it to other-oriented mode of interacting. Young children need to be taught respect for elders—here, she means especially older relatives—in order to learn to respect others and more generally, to show good judgment and responsibility (lines 17 to 25). Further, it bears repeating that Norma’s description of educación involves the highly reflexive mode of modeling utterances, just as the example from Emmanuel above. In lines 9 and 10, for example, Norma begins to speak as if addressing a child in need of some educación. Also, in Norma’s rendition of the problem with the children of today, she uses the verbs of exchange “to give” (dar) and “to receive” (recibir) to emphasize the reciprocal relation between parent and child: in an earlier generation, the teachers gave discipline (dan una corrección, prior to excerpt) but today everything is given to the “little kings,” lines 3 and 4. Without the proper form of discipline, however, the children of today do not know what to give in return, and they are not conscious of the effort that parents make, and therefore they do not form correct judgment (criterio) to know what to ask for, lines 9–22. This quality of having the ability to judge, of being educado, she ties directly to the display of respect for elders and for everyone else, which must be taught in childhood, lines 26–30. In contrast to Norma were Latino parents who felt that “traditional” Latin American parenting was too authoritarian. In their descriptions, the voice of the severe Latino parent was set against the more open Israeli child. Wilfredo, an Ecuadorian who lived in Israel with his wife and two daughters, was especially critical of his mother, whom he characterized as having una voz de mando, “a commanding voice.” Like Norma, he also expressed that times had changed in terms of disciplining children from when he was a child, when (in Spanish) “our parents made us respect elders from a young age.” He further noted that he and his wife were not always successful in instilling this behavior in their own daughters. Yet during the interview, while critical of Latino children in Israel, he also faulted the ambiente familiar (“the family environment”) in Latin America for restricting children too much. He used his own three-year-old daughter as an example, and also produced the voice of the authoritarian Latin American parent as a contrast: Excerpt 2.3 Wilfredo characterizes Latin American educación as limiting 1 2 3 4

W: aquí los niños son más abiertos más despiertos mi pequeña es más despierta a esa edad que tú la vez es muy despierta

5 6 7

muy muy muy despierta en Ecuador no a esa edad no son muy despiertos

W: here kids are more open more awake my little one is more alert at that age which you see her she’s very alert very very very alert in Ecuador no at that age they aren’t very alert (Continued)

70  |  Latinos in Israel Excerpt 2.3 Wilfredo characterizes Latin American educación as limiting 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

¿cómo te doy un ejemplo? aquí los niños pueden jugar afuera en la tierra y no importa si llegan chorreando polvo a la casa no pasa nada los meten a la ducha y los bañan y punto en Ecuador lo sacas afuera “no te vayas a ensuciar de arena” “no te vayas a ensuciar de (. . .)” “no te vayas a ensuciar de tierra” “no te vayas a-” entonces hay la¿cómo se podría decir? no un amparo de la persona hacia el niño sino no lo deja que se desenvuelve (yo lo he visto) como aquí los dejan

how can I give you an example? here kids can play outside in the dirt and it doesn’t matter if they arrive home dripping dust nothing happens you put them in the shower and you wash them and period in Ecuador you take him outside “don’t get dirty with sand” “don’t get dirty with (. . .)” “don’t get dirty with dirt” “don’t get-” so there’s thehow can I put it? not a protection from the person toward the child but you don’t allow him to develop (I’ve seen) how here they allow them

The authoritarian voice of command here is presented in lines 15–18, limiting the free movement of a child at play. In lines 21–22, he stresses that this authoritarian voice does not actually operate to protect children but only serves to prevent the intellectual development of the child, which is why they seem more “alert” in Israel, lines 1–7. The defining characteristic of the “openness” or “alertness” found in Israel is the freedom of children to speak to parents without redress. On this, there was a high degree of agreement. As an example of how alert and developed his three-year-old daughter is, Wilfredo explained that when they travel in a taxi, she will chat with the driver the whole trip, like a “parrot.” Another Ecuadorian father, who also had a three-year-old daughter as well as two older daughters, used a similar measuring stick. I asked him about a recording he had done in which his young daughter continuously interrupts her mother while her mother is speaking with other adults. He explained that in Ecuador, children are taught to never speak when adults are speaking. In contrast, in Israel children are included more (son más integrados). To make his point further, he suggested that his two older daughters, who went to kindergarten in Ecuador, would not interrupt adults’ conversations, while this younger one does. For these fathers, the irrepressible three-year-olds sound keen and alert, rather than showing disrespect.

Strangers in Their Own Home  |  71 Many Latino parents saw similar positive aspects in Israeli self-expressive modes of speaking, and, within limits, in the breaking of hierarchies. However, even for those that agreed with Wilfredo, many Israeli children go overboard. Israeli parents were generally seen as allowing too much free rein. The stereotypic Israeli child that they described collectively was a series of contrasts: alert yet demanding, assertive yet self-centered, sincere yet rude. Not surprisingly, stories circulated widely about Israeli kids and how they behaved. Such stories informed judgments of the behavior of Latino kids. For example, when I asked one Colombian mother, Magdalena, whether it was true that Israeli kids are too direct when speaking with their parents, she answered excitedly with a story of comparative domestic intimacy. She explained what she saw at the home of an Israeli family where she worked. If the eighteen-year-old daughter asked her mother for something, like a new shirt, and didn’t get it, she would kick up a storm. Magdalena began contrasting this daughter with her own son, to represent the contrast between Israeli and Latino. Not unlike Emmanuel (see above, Excerpt 2.1), Magdalena was careful to distance herself from the terrible things the daughter said to the mother—Magdalena was even reluctant to repeat them during the interview. She described the daughter slamming doors and stating things that “you say only when you are extremely angry.” Magdalena also repeated that her son would never do this, no matter how angry. Importantly, as she continued, Magdalena used an expression Latinos often used to characterize the lack of educación in Israeli parent-child interactions: “she’d treat her mother horribly, like another person, never like her mother.” For Latinos, and especially Latino parents, a child using such a self-expressive mode with her parents was like treating them outside of the sacred reciprocity of educación. It was to treat them like Israelis treat each other, which to Latinos seemed like a form of stranger sociality. After some prodding, Magdalena finally gave an example of how her employer’s daughter would speak: Excerpt 2.4 Magdalena’s example 1 2 3

M: la muchacha tenía novio y la mamá no lo quería y ella le decía

4 5

“no te metas en mi vida” “¿qué te importa mi vida?” [Pause] “ben zona”

6

M: the girl had a boyfriend and the mother didn’t like him and she’d [the daughter] say to her [the mother] “don’t interfere with my life” “what do you care about my life?” [Pause] “son of a bitch”

72  |  Latinos in Israel As she represented the girl’s typical speech in Spanish (lines 4–6), embedded in the habitual past by le decía, she used some breathiness to signal the shouting tone of the daughter. And then, the really horrible part after a dramatic pause, ben zona in Hebrew (no doubt the daughter had used the feminine form, bat zona). Magdalena’s pause, as well as her reticence to give examples, helps to keep this word distant from her own person—she bends over backwards to voice the “ben zona” as a kind of behavior that is foreign to her. Even though they are mostly in Spanish, these lines represent the speech of a Hebrew-speaking actor, exemplifying the footing of a spoiled Israeli child who treats her own mother like “another person, never like her mother.” To finish her story about this episode, Magdalena explained that she left work that day because she could not bear to see the daughter attack the mother any longer. Stories like Magdalena’s were legion. They suggested to Latinos that a lack of educación was common to Israelis, whether at home or in public. Yet this outsider, like Wilfredo’s daughter or José when he responded to Zoe, could end up appearing as a voice emanating from a Latino. This voice of the Israeli outsider challenged the supposed shared educación of Latinos. It constantly suggested to them that they were transformed by their immigration—despite their undocumented legal status. It constantly suggested to them that they could be Israeli.

Strange Intimacy The voice of the Israeli in their homes brought up another question: what if Israeli lack of educación is actually a better kind of educación? A more modern kind of educación? All Latino adults at some point seemed to entertain this question. Norma of course was not having any of it. For her, in Israel there is no educación, and according to her, her foreign-born employers agreed. Norma also resisted any suggestion that someone could show educación while speaking Hebrew. As part of Israel, Hebrew had no educación. But Norma and others like her held the extreme position on this question. Most Latino adults who had lived a long time in Israel felt changed by their migration and were open to the possibility that this change was for the better. When pushed, they could separate Hebrew as a language from what they understood to be Israeli (lack of) educación. More than anything else, though, they wondered if they or their children had not become more modern by acting like Israelis. There was a transnational dimension to their reflexivity: they often recognized their transformation when speaking to their family still living in or visiting from Latin America. The same person could describe why Israeli interactional practices could seem harsh to Latinos, and also give examples of how they themselves had changed. For example, in 2002, I had a group conversation with four Latino flatmates comparing Latino and Israeli ways of speaking. Fred, an Ecuadorian, explained that Latinos are shocked when they arrive. Latinos, he noted, are accustomed to a softer tone (tono) of voice. As in the excerpts reviewed above, Fred represented the voice of Israelis.

Strangers in Their Own Home  |  73 Excerpt 2.5 Fred characterizes Israeli speech 1 2 3 4

F: otra forma de reacción en cuanto a comunicarse así de eso [pointing to object] “pásame esto” pero no es que ellos te están gritando

8 9

ni retando sino la forma de ellos es así, ¿ves?* la mayor parte de nosotros los latinos hablamos casi despacio como tono pero ellos tienenbueno, ellos pagan al ejército

10 11 12

eh, las mujeres y todo no es agradable ¡entonces eso! [claps hand]

5 6 7

F: another way of reacting as far as communicating saying about that [pointing to object] “give me this” but it’s not that they [Israelis] are yelling at you nor scolding but their way is like that, see?* most of us the Latinos speak almost softly in tone but they havewell, they serve in the army eh, the women and everything it’s not fun so this! [claps hand]

*I have edited out some false starts to save space.

In line 3, Fred gives an example of how an Israeli would ask for an object that lay nearby, placing heavy stress on the initial syllable to suggest how abrupt it seems to Latinos. However, as he immediately points out, this is not considered by Israelis yelling or scolding (lines 4–5). Fred further gives an ideological explanation, very common among Israelis, about why they are nervous when they speak, namely that they go into the army and generally live in a state of tension, lines 9–12.24 The clap in line 12 signifies the shock to one’s person of the political tension and of serving in the military. Later in the conversation, to speak about the transformation of Latinos in Israel, Fred recounted a telephone conversation with his sister in Ecuador. While he was talking to his sister on the phone and giving her instructions, she asked him if he was angry at her. Excerpt 2.6 Fred’s instructions to his sister 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

F: hablábamos por teléfono y yo dándole unas explicaciones le digo “tienes que hacer así así así así y así” y le digo “si algo te sale mal” “tú dime” “lo que te sale mal” “el problema que tú tengas” “dímelo”

F: we were talking by telephone and I giving her some instructions I say to her “you have to do this this this this and this” and I say “if something goes wrong” “you tell me” “whatever goes wrong” “any problem you have” “tell me about it” (Continued)

74  |  Latinos in Israel Excerpt 2.6  Continued 9 10 11 12 13

“no te ocultes nada” “no me ocultes nada” “dímelo, dime todo” y me decía “¿pero por qué te has enojado?” [Laughter]

“don’t hide anything” “don’t hide anything from me” “tell me about it, tell me everything” and she was saying to me “but why did you get angry?” [Laughter]

Fred’s story plays out across a series of instructions he was giving to his sister in Ecuador (lines 3 to 11), which are given in the same tone as the “pásame esto” (line 3 in Excerpt 2.5) he had previously discussed. Hearing his sister’s reaction, Fred realized he was giving instructions the way an Israeli would give him instructions. Fred’s sister found his instructions to be given in an overly self-expressive mode, whereas, as Fred continued, “naturally for me it didn’t seem that I was angry.” Equally importantly, Fred pointed at his three flatmates and stated that they probably would have been able to “receive” (recibir) his instructions without issue: “okay, they [his flatmates] because they are here [in Israel], probably already receive it, see? But her [his sister] because she is there [in Ecuador], well, totally different.” With this transnational calculus, Fred claims that his flatmates, accustomed to Israel, would not have complained about his tone. Such examples of the ways that Latinos had unexpectedly become like Israelis were legion. One longtime resident of Colombian origin often phrased the ambivalence that these changes produced as uno se adapta, no se acostumbra, “one adapts, but doesn’t become accustomed.” Here, she was specifically referring to the ways Israelis interact, which she finds too familiar and always bordering on rude. Another Colombian, Luna, told the story of how one of her older relatives in Colombia remarked that her twelve-year-old son Juan did not “ask for a blessing” (pedir la bendición) when he greeted the relative on the phone. That is, he did not engage in the routine of stating hola tía, la bendición, ¿cómo le va? “Hi auntie, the blessing, how are you?” The reply he should receive would be something like hola sobrino, que Dios lo bendiga, ¿cómo está usted? “Hi nephew, may God bless you, how are you?” Luna recounted how she answered her family member: one gets used to this way of speaking in Israel. Another example was given to me by Jackie, a nine-year resident of Israel originally from Quito, who was visited by her older brother and his son for ten days one summer. Whenever her brother called to his son, the latter would come to his father and say mande, “tell me.” But Jackie’s brother remarked that she and her sons shout from one room to the other, and he asked why, saying it was very unpleasant (feo). Jackie answered that she didn’t know why, and that she no longer noticed it.

Strangers in Their Own Home  |  75 These multiple examples show how Latinos considered themselves transformed by engaging in the interactional practices common in Israel. Fred not only suggested that Israeli interactional behavior, initially strange and shocking to Latinos, became ordinary, he also claimed it even became part of Latino interpersonal intimacy in Israel. Fred also connected this explanation to the ideological claims of Israelis that their anxiety is due to military life and the sense of existential threat. That is, this and the other descriptions point to how Latinos came to understand themselves as participating in the national cultural intimacy signaled by Israeli interactional directness.

Educación and the Delicate Balance of Marginalized People Besides deportation, Latino parents feared one thing more than any other: losing authority over their children. Latinos often discussed their hopes for the future in terms of giving better opportunities to their children. As marginalized youth, Latino adolescents were at risk to be drawn into unstable life courses, with uncertain economic futures. Parents had already risked a great deal in order to stabilize their income through migration. They maintained high hopes that their children would climb the ladder of social mobility, and even make it to university and potentially join the professional middle classes either in Israel or in Latin America. The possibility that their children would instead join the unstable and precarious labor market, or even potentially the shadowy world of illicit activity, made parents deeply anxious. Much of the anxiety about parental authority to determine future prospects was experienced in how their children did or did not show respect. The emergence of “Israeli” interactional behavior in their own children could be a sign of people who could stand up for themselves in the future. Or it could be a sign of youth going off course. The uncertainty amplified anxieties in parents. The future viewed through children meant that Israeli “modernity” called to Latinos, and that maybe Israeli (lack of?) educación would eventually mean better economic stability. Parents were full of examples of how their children asserted themselves too much, always teetering on being “too Israeli”—a stranger in the home. Luna told with bemused embarrassment about how Juan protected his laptop computer from the priest who was visiting once. When I helped them decide which laptop to buy, I warned Juan not to allow drinks around it, lest they spill into the keyboard and damage the internal components. Juan took this warning to heart and guarded the computer carefully, especially when his young friends would come to play computer games—and as Luna told it, also when her friend the priest visited. When the priest approached the computer with a drink in hand, Juan sternly warned him that drinks were not allowed around the computer. Luna was shocked by this infraction of hospitality, and especially toward a respected older friend and priest.25 Luna added some stories about Juan’s quick temper. But

76  |  Latinos in Israel then she reflected: at least Juan knows how to protect his interests and take care of himself. However, as a single mother living with her only son, and living through the stressful times of deportations and an uncertain future, Luna feared for her relationship with him. That is why she spoke with horror when she heard of another boy, Alfonso (two years older than Juan), whose mother sent him to Colombia after some eight years in Israel. As part of Tel Aviv municipal social integration strategies, Alfonso had been sent to a posh northern Tel Aviv school, where he quickly became an outsider, skipped classes regularly, and entered a peer group of other kids alienated from school authority. Eventually, Alfonso’s mother, fearing she no longer controlled him, sent him to live with his older brother in Colombia, and herself entered a job as a live-in domestic, where she would be safer from the immigration police.26 Moving to a position as a live-in worker was no small sacrifice for Alfonso’s mother: while working live-in provided her more protection, Latinos consider such jobs “enslaving” (esclavisante) because the worker loses control of the hours worked and her mobility. Luna shuddered at the thought of being thus separated from her son. She told me that she was surprised because she knew Alfonso when he was younger, and he had always been very polite (muy formalito), always making sure to extend greetings. Magdalena, whose son Cecilio was good friends with Alfonso in high school, similarly registered her shock, noting that Alfonso had often been at her house and was always a very nice young man, but that later she discovered he had been stealing and was dragging Cecilio “to perdition.” To these mothers, Alfonso’s display of manners had appeared those of a child who had been raised properly. Magdalena lamented that parents work such long hours, and they are therefore never really sure what their children are doing during the day. In other words, the shock these two mothers described was discovering that Alfonso’s show of respeto did not actually represent his educación. Further, their shock registers the fragility of parental authority over children. Alfonso’s case represents a worst-case scenario, where the educación parents try to instill is overcome by what are considered outside factors, beyond their control. Of course, such an eventuality is not limited to Latino immigrants in Israel: it is a possibility faced by marginalized families around the world, and certainly by underprivileged Palestinian, Mizrahi, and Ethiopian families, among others, in Israel. Alfonso’s mother had already been victimized once: she initially moved to Israel after her older son was shot by drug dealers in Colombia. However, for Latinos in Israel, the display of “Israeli” behavior projects the powerful image of outside factors, especially given the stereotype of Israeli children who do not respect their parents. In short, their fears about the future of their children are mapped onto their daily evaluation of a child’s behavior for signs of educación. If Latino children did not seem to be displaying educación, parents feared for their ability to direct them.

Strangers in Their Own Home  |  77 The issues Latino parents confronted by trying to instill educación were sometimes understood as linguistic (or denotational) in essence. Moral questions arose about their inability to perfectly commensurate between Latino/ Spanish and Israeli/Hebrew concepts. I once arrived at the home of Luna and Juan as they were in the middle of a discussion regarding Juan’s first few classes in the high school he had just entered. Juan, already a little frustrated, was trying to explain to Luna that in one of his classes he had a series of four smaller “quizzes” (Hebrew, boxanim) rather than a single, large “exam” (Hebrew, mivxan). However, he only had the Spanish word examen, and Luna was clearly not following his intent, namely, that Juan would be studying for smaller tests. Juan turned to me for help, and, on the spot, I could not find Spanish terms to convey the distinction (e.g., prueba versus examen). I tried to explain, but Luna did not seem convinced, worried that Juan was trying to get out of schoolwork. In this example, schooling represents the future life course that Luna wanted for Juan. Many parents reported similar episodes and described their children’s frustration. A second example displays more of the stakes involved. Jackie had gone back to attending church after a difficult period in which her mother, the longtime caregiver for her older son, was deported, and then was subsequently killed in a car accident along with one of Jackie’s brothers in Ecuador. I was visiting her, and asked her about the private Hebrew classes she had recently joined with three other mothers. She explained that the impetus to study Hebrew came from a moment of miscommunication with her nine-year-old younger son, Isaías, who, born and raised in Israel, had limited competence in Spanish. She recounted that she had been trying to teach him “moral principles” (principios morales) and she used a word that Isaías did not understand. She could not recall which word exactly, but gave the example of bondad, “kindness.” Jackie was greatly troubled by her inability to communicate this concept to Isaías. She called her older son, Claudio, to come and translate, but the rupture was not mended. Jackie explained that she barely slept that night. She was too distraught by the breakdown in communication. It was then that she resolved to learn Hebrew. She concluded that avoiding Hebrew was the worst thing she and other Latina mothers had done. Jackie felt she could not hold up her end of parental reciprocity without Hebrew: she could not properly give formation to her son’s character. Jackie may not have been able to communicate this concept easily to Isaías even if she spoke perfect Hebrew. Luna’s concern about how her son would be studying, and the difficulty she had understanding how the school worked, also is not an issue of linguistic competence alone. Like Alfonso’s mother, they were beset by the problems of trying to maintain authority over their children despite their limited economic means, the long hours they worked, and the racialization

78  |  Latinos in Israel they faced as unauthorized immigrants. Yet, as in other cases discussed in this book, they tended to interpret their political economic conditions through the terms of cultural politics: if they could acquire the right cultural conduct, they believed they could better direct their children. This form of interpreting political economic marginalization through cultural difference also made Latino parents reflect on their own behavior. The future orientation of educación was considered to be closely related to the future working life of Latino children. Jackie expressed this when she contrasted the educación she underwent in Ecuador to that of her own son in Israel. Excerpt 2.7 Jackie contrasts Israeli educación with her own upbringing 1 2 3

4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

J: bueno, en parte me gusta porque no son tan reprimidos creo que en nuestra cultura lo que nos hemos criado nosotros, yo personalmente, es una educación reprimida muy reprimida uno no tiene derecho a decir lo que piensa [. . .]* entonces en parte yo creo que en un futuro para ellos ellos van a expresar lo que sienten si van a un trabajo van a decir lo que sienten que no se sienten bien, que están mal pero en cambio en mí no yo por ejemplo si estoy en un trabajo yo pienso veinte veces, y me doy veinte veces la vuelta, para decir algo en cambio yo siento que ellos no que ellos cuandoen un futuro ellos van a expresar lo que sienten si no les gusta algo, si les gusta algo en ese aspecto sí algo positivo pero, mejor dicho, yo creo que la mentalidad de nosotros, la mía, tiene que un poco más evolucionar.

*Here Jackie spoke about another example.

J: well, in part I like it because they are not so repressed I think that in our culture with which we’ve been raised, me personally, it’s a repressed education very repressed you don’t have the right to say what you think [. . .]* so in part I think that in their [her children’s] future they are going to express what they feel if they go to a job they’re going to say what they feel that they don’t feel well, that they’re doing bad but on the other hand not for me I for example if I’m at work I think twenty times, and I turn around twenty times, before saying something on the other hand I feel that they won’t that they whenin the future they will express what they feel if they don’t like something, if they do like something in that respect yes something positive but, better yet, I believe that our mentality, mine, has to evolve a bit

Strangers in Their Own Home  |  79 For Jackie, the fact that Claudio expresses his thoughts is part of the more modern culture of Israel. For instance she uses the word “evolve” in line 18, invoking the time-space framework that puts Latin America on the traditional and earlier time, with its authoritarian parenting. Jackie attributes her inability to complain about her work to this upbringing, this traditional educación. She does not attribute this inability to her marginal status in Israel, and the fact that she cannot afford to lose days of work. “In my country,” she explained earlier in the interview, “to grumble about food isn’t good. . . . In our home [in Ecuador] you eat what there is.” The voice of the strict traditional parent—constantly running through your head, so to speak—makes you into someone who cannot complain about work either. Jackie’s eloquent support for this ability to express oneself is linked in another way to her own migration narrative. In a separate immigration interview, Jackie explained that it was not because of economic necessity that she had left Ecuador. She actually had earned a good salary, and when one of her friends initially suggested going to Israel, she did not consider it. But as a young, unwed mother, Jackie was subject to the severe censure of her mother and older brothers, who constantly reproached her for spending time outside the home. That is, when she says that “our educación” is too repressive, she links it to the very strict upbringing she underwent. As she explained in lines 10–12, she is unable to this day to complain when she is exploited at work. Although she recognizes the difference in educación between her children and those of her siblings in Ecuador, she hopes that her children will gain a different sense of self that will enable them to say what they think. Jackie draws a future horizon (line 6) where her children’s educación will match the modern times. For her and many Latinos, Israeli (lack of?) educación might actually be the right way forward.

Conclusion This chapter discusses how the life courses that Latinos hope for, and especially that Latino parents hope for their children to follow, make them think a lot about educación: how hard it is to instill Latin American educación in Latino children in Israel, how different educación seems to be in Israel, and whether the Israeli version might not carry some advantages. Certain kinds of behavior in Latino domestic contexts could seem to come from the outside, from Israeli culture, and bring to the fore uncertainties about Latino cultural difference. A cultural politics that has been playing out since the formation of Israel, as I suggest in the introduction, also plays out in the most intimate contexts of Latino domestic reproduction. With the heavy emphasis on the future life course, the voice of the Israeli outsider can at times seem to signal a more modern educación: a more direct and familiar way for Latino families to interact. That logic made Israeli practices sometimes appear better to Latinos: more suited to a future with social mobility. As Jackie puts it (see excerpt 2.7), maybe her son will be able to complain about work in ways that

80  |  Latinos in Israel she herself is not able. From the perspective of parents like Jackie, their children’s language use, as part of a context of immigrating, seems like a series of arrows pointing toward a future-oriented and more “modern” self. Yet the modernization of educación is dangerous if the process goes too far and their children treat them like strangers. At that point, parents lose the ability to direct their own children’s behavior. No parent wanted to end up in the situation of Alfonso’s mother, having to separate from her child and send him back to Latin America. Such a result meant admitting the failure of educación, and of the effort of migration. No wonder parents were so anxious and ambivalent about how their children spoke. On the one hand, speaking in ways (ideologically) associated with Israelis could represent a confident, independent child. On the other, it might be too much, and represent a youth who was (as Magdalena put it) on the road to perdition. The issue of educación had another aspect, however. Latino families acknowledged that their sensitivity to familiarity and intimacy was different than that of their Latin American kin. Along with the suggestion that Latinos were becoming more “modern” by speaking like Israelis, they were also coming to sense themselves as part of the people, experiencing in their domestic worlds the cultural intimacy that Israelis identify with their national culture. At times, Israeli interactional practices produced sensations of strangeness, but when that strangeness became more familiar, like a kind of confianza, it then produced an experience of belonging. If Latinos could belong to the Israeli people, they could start conceiving of themselves as citizens. As I will discuss in chapter 6, ultimately it was Latino youth who could produce a compelling performance of belonging to the nation, and thus be recognized as citizens. In the next chapter, I discuss how Latino kids participated in institutions of socialization, especially after-school programs targeting them as youth at risk, where they learned some of the rhetoric associated with paradigmatic citizens.

Notes 1. To be clear, when I say José spoke in Spanish, I do not mean the Spanish José used to speak in Colombia. Many Latinos spoke a variety of Spanish with many Hebraicisms at home. 2. I wrote down these two lines shortly after (over)hearing them. 3. I will be systematically using two meanings of intimacy in this chapter, which I believe converge in the social phenomena under study. First is the meaning taken from the literature on cultural intimacy (Herzfeld 2005; Shryock 2004a), where in fact the “intimacy” on display is one that is recognized publicly as a national form, usually with a mixture of embarrassment and covert pride (e.g., “why are we Israelis so rude . . .”). Here also, I draw on the work of Lauren Berlant (1997, 1998; Berlant and Warner 1998) and Michael Warner (2002a), who discuss how the cultural politics of publicness (my term) involve racialized and gendered markers (among others) of intimacy that help to specify who is actually being

Strangers in Their Own Home  |  81 addressed, and who is being excluded. National cultural intimacy, in other words, is a very public matter, one which also plays out in small-scale contexts. Second, in line with the literature on the pragmatics of honorifics cited in this chapter, I am drawing on the tradition of showing solidarity versus hierarchy in interaction, which goes back to the seminal paper by Brown and Gilman (1960) on pronoun usage. If in the classic bourgeois public sphere, stranger sociality could have been a show of civilized impersonal distance—i.e., something like exchanging V-forms like French vous—then Israeli cultural intimacy is like exchanging T-forms like French tu to mark familiarity and closeness, even between strangers. It is the link between these two kinds of contexts that interests me: what Latinos see as an overly familiar approach by Israelis between strangers (not using the pragmatic equivalent of exchanging V-forms) can seem at the same time like a possibly better way to produce confianza with children (using the pragmatic equivalent of parents and children exchanging T-forms instead of marking hierarchy by parents addressing children with T-forms, and children responding with V-forms). To be clear, the marking of hierarchy that I am considering goes beyond pronominal T/V-forms. 4. See the introduction for a discussion of Israeli interactional directness (dugri) and its historical role in constituting the virtuous settler citizen, and see chapter 1 for a discussion of Latinos’ shock at encountering the voice of the straight-talking Israeli. 5. As I have discussed elsewhere (Paz 2015a), this Israeli outsider is not necessarily the stranger sociality of mass mediated publicness. It can also be associated with encounters in the street discussed in chapter 1. 6. By “face” here, I am referring to the concept of facework found in Erving Goffman’s work (Goffman 1967; see also P. Brown and Levinson 1987). 7. In their seminal work on language ideologies, Susan Gal and Judith Irvine (1995; Irvine and Gal 2000) use the term “fractal recursivity” to explain this kind of phenomenon, where a major binary distinction (like public versus private) is reproduced at another level (for example, when something associated with public spaces appears in a transformed way within apparently private contexts). This is one of three major ideological processes of semiosis that they identify. The other two are “iconization” (or later “rhematization”) by which they mean that signs of a phenomenon take on a relation of similarity, and “erasure,” by which they mean that the complexity of a phenomenon is perceived in a much simpler way. See also Gal (2002). 8. The literature on code-switching (and its historical analogue, “borrowing”) is voluminous. For some seminal papers and reviews, see Blom and Gumperz (1972), Poplack (1980), Gumperz (1982), Auer (1984), Gal (1987), Heller (1988), Woolard (1989a, 1998, 2004), Myers-Scotton (1993), Zentella (1997). 9. To assume that there are easy distinctions between languages reinforces nationalist and colonial ideologies about standard languages exist as pure and distinct entities, with clear histories. As studies of sociolinguistic variation (whether in monoglot or polyglot speech communities) show again and again, when we analyze language use in context, it is treacherous to assume that how people participate in a discursive interaction can be easily mapped to stable, coherent languages. Instead, studies show constant and systematic variation with innovations as new social groups form. This open-ended process of sociolinguistic variation was famously called “heteroglossia” by Bakhtin (1981a). 10. Goffman’s paper on footing begins by addressing John Gumperz’s foundational work on code-switching as an interactional move. For more on footing and participant roles, see S. Levinson (1988), Irvine (1996), and Wortham (1996).

82  |  Latinos in Israel 11. To be precise, Errington is using a foundational distinction made in the early twentieth century by psychologist and linguist Karl Bühler (esp. [1934] 2011) between the use of linguistic forms that direct attention (i) to speaker, (ii) to addressee, or (iii) to referent. These are not absolute distinctions but rather distinctions of degree, and they overlap. That is, there is no easy equivalence between some forms that are only directed at speaker versus some that are only directed at addressee or referent. Instead, the functions of forms work together to produce these effects (and others, which for example Roman Jakobson [1971] expanded upon). Errington aims to move beyond the influential description of bilingualism, mostly associated with John Gumperz, that expressed the relation of language and group as in-group we-codes versus out-group they-codes. Errington also recasts Gumperz’s “personalization” versus “objectification” opposition as a way to speak objectively about referents, or an it-code. Here, the question of the it-code will not play a significant role. 12. Errington is starting from suggestive observations in Siegel (1986). On the question of “masks” and personhood, see the classic essay by anthropologist Marcel Mauss (1985) as well as the accompanying commentaries in Carrithers, Collins, and Lukes (1985). 13. I take the term “metapragmatic stereotype” from Asif Agha (1998); it means that a characteristic type of person is associated with an enregistered set of signs. 14. For a more detailed discussion of these variables, and the methodology used to find them, see Paz (2010, 46–151). 15. See introduction for discussion of the Herderian basis of such nationalist language ideologies. 16. For further descriptions of these interviews, with examples, see Paz (2015a, 2015b). 17. Latinos with a middle-class background, or with university education—or those who spoke with the refinement of the Latin American middle class—were considered to show the most educación. 18. I have not represented this mock shouting intonation in the transcript. It generally involves breathiness as well as sentential accent toward the beginning of the text-sentence. 19. On the complicated issues involved in transposing voices, see for example M. Silverstein (1985b, 1996), Hanks (1990, 192–229), Lucy (1993a), Hill (1995), Haviland (1996a, 1996b), Shoaps (1999, 2002), and Paz (2014). 20. For an extended example of how the voice of the Israeli stranger appears in domestic interactions between Latino parents and their children, complete with transcript analysis, see Paz (2015a). 21. Judith Irvine (1996, 139) mentions a similar relation in her article on wedding insult poems: she notes that the mother of the bride never has to be mentioned explicitly in these poems, because she is considered responsible for her daughter’s upbringing. 22. Here is another point of convergence between Latin American countries and Israel, pointing to a shared globality. 23. Here, the meaning is somewhat ambiguous. Norma probably means that the children do not realize what kind of effort the parents have made to gain the money that their children expect them to spend. 24. I heard similar things said by many Latinos. See Yair (2014) for a sociological description of the ubiquity of Jewish-Israeli anxieties about existential threats. 25. No doubt the priest himself was a little shocked at Juan’s blunt style in issuing the prohibition. Luna told me that he phoned back later and asked with amusement how Juan’s computer was doing. 26. Israeli policy restricted police from deporting children and their only caregiver, so when Alfonso left the country his mother no longer was safe from deportation.

3

Inculcating Citizenship Language, Performance, and the Commensuration of Cultural Difference

O

n June 18, 2006, the Israeli government passed a Resolution that “amended” the Resolution passed one year earlier, and thus expanded the pathway to citizenship for the children of noncitizen labor migrants, as well as to their parents and any siblings. A week and a half earlier, with rumors swirling that the amended Resolution would be passed at long last, La Escuelita volunteers and parents met and its director, Diego Manuel, made a striking declaration. He explained that previously the role of La Escuelita was to prepare Latino children to return to their countries. Now, he continued, La Escuelita would dedicate itself to preserving “la cultura y las raíces” (the culture and the roots) of Latino children. On the eve of a historic government decision, a youth organization was rethinking the relation of Latino children to the pasts of their parents and families, and, like Zionist youth movements going back to the Mandate period, it was starting to reformulate the relation of these families to the state. In essence, Diego Manuel suggested a way that Latino difference fits within Israeli ideas about the partial commensurability of some diasporic pasts and heritage. Latinos could be thought of as being like Jewish immigrant populations: instead of having roots in, say, Morocco or Poland or Bukhara, Latinos had roots in Latin America. This chapter considers the role of two youth organizations in the lives of Latinos, and how they prepared youth to participate in public as citizens. Both are after-school programs that met twice weekly (on different days), and Latino children and teenagers from south Tel Aviv comprised the bulk of their participants. One was La Escuelita, “the little school,” an after-school program that met Mondays and Fridays for two-hour sessions. La Escuelita promoted ways for Latino kids to recognize themselves in Latin American public culture, whether in the formal, written registers of Spanish used in much public sphere interaction, or in the big public performances for holidays like Christmas and Mothers’ Day. La Escuelita helped produce a diasporic imaginary for Latino kids, that is, a sense that while they lived in Israel, they originated from somewhere else.1 To some extent, these cultural performances could also conform to Israeli cosmopolitan practices of consuming Latin American difference

84  |  Latinos in Israel locally. The diasporic imaginary projected by such performances then could be reinterpreted as acceptable Israeli difference: cultural roots that could be partially commensurate. The other program was the Israeli Scout troop of the Shapira neighborhood, located near the Tel Aviv central bus station. The troop, called eitan (strong), was another after-school program with a large emphasis on public culture—that of official Israeli nationalism.2 Parallel to La Escuelita’s performances during Latin American holidays, Eitan participated publicly in the national calendar with activities for Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year), Purim, Memorial Day, and the like. Formal standard language literacy was not part of the teaching practice at Eitan, and yet standard Hebrew still played an important role in public performances. The children who attended the Israeli Scouts were being socialized into a youth movement with a history of helping to constitute reliable citizens, one that extended back to Mandate Palestine (roughly 1918–1948). In the 2005–2006 school year, probably half of Eitan’s regular participants were noncitizen Latinos. The question of how these Latino kids could exemplify Israeli citizenship was therefore front and center in most activities. Despite their emphases on different public cultures, La Escuelita and Eitan Troop shared much common ground in their goals and pasts. First, both shared an institutional history, as Latino teenagers from La Escuelita were vital to restarting the Eitan Troop in 2002. Second, both sought to instruct Latino youth in making public claims to citizenship. Third, and perhaps most importantly, both directed their efforts as part of a much larger web of state and para-state welfare and charitable organizations that sought to help the low-income families of Tel Aviv’s southern neighborhoods.3 By targeting the southern neighborhoods in this way, these organizations tended to highlight the precarious class position of the most racialized and marginalized residents of Tel Aviv. While helping them, organizations also challenged Latino and other labor migrant families, often perceiving them as lacking motivation due to cultural alienation. These perceived issues of motivation meant that Latino moral personhood, crucial to defining the citizen (Muehlebach 2012), was impugned. The connection between poverty and culture fostered by welfare organizations made Latino children recognizable in the cultural politics of personhood: the public performances were a script intended to give form to the Latino child’s self (see Carr 2011, esp. 23–48). These organizations thus helped frame the voice of the Latino child as part of mediating it to the Israel public sphere. In ways that echo such politics of culture and personhood, the activities of La Escuelita and Eitan Troop were premised on the idea that socializing children to standard language registers and national cultural performance could help them overcome their marginality. Both produced and encouraged participation in large neighborhood-based cultural performances. This chapter reviews two

Inculcating Citizenship | 85 in depth, El Festival Folklórico y Cultural put on by La Escuelita, from which comes this book’s cover, and a tekes esh (Fire Ceremony) put on by the Eitan Scouts. In line with long-standing study of performance (Bauman and Briggs 1990; Briggs and Bauman 1992; Lemon 2000; M. Silverstein and Urban 1996a; Wirtz 2014), my analysis will especially focus on processual aspects of interaction during the performances. For example, I examine how the audience is identified and thus positioned as a part of a public of Israeli citizens that could recognize Latinos.4 It is the performative, or world-creating, effects of these processes that are key to understanding how such recognition could result from Latino youth’s engagement with audiences.5 Importantly, in La Escuelita and Eitan Scouts, Latino children were not being directed toward a form of deliberative publicness, like that most famously associated with Jürgen Habermas’s arguments about “rational-critical” debate in the bourgeois public sphere (Habermas 1989; cf. Calhoun 1992; Hirschkind 2006; Wedeen 2008).6 Instead, these Latino youth were being socialized into ritualized performance of folkloric and official culture. Further, these performances comprised “entangled” (Lukose 2005) forms in the process of gendering publicness. This gendering is particularly evident in the case of La Escuelita, where the parents were collectively known as las mamás (the moms). This chapter first considers how institutional sites of socialization to language and public culture are a vital aspect of how subjects form that can claim citizenship, and how this aspect has been key to theorizing citizenship. I then discuss how La Escuelita was founded and maintained as part of a welfare intervention to help overcome the marginalization of Latinos, and explain how El Festival both promotes this kind of intervention as well as produces Latino culture as a commodity for Israelis. I turn next to the Eitan Troop and consider how the Scouts sought to make a similar intervention, in part by busing in counselors from a wealthy north Tel Aviv neighborhood. I finish the chapter by going over the Fire Ceremony that Eitan Troop put on in 2005 as a neighborhood performance. The chapter thus focuses on how performing in public was considered to aid Latino youth development of a moral personhood for citizenship.

Socialization and Citizenship as Public Life Publicness, citizenship, and education are deeply connected, and to this day, formal schooling is still oriented to the cultivating of citizens as much as of workers (B. A. Levinson 2005). Becoming an “educated person,” that is, is an important aspect of participating in public as a full-fledged citizen (B. A. Levinson, Foley, and Holland 1996; Sam Kaplan 2006). Educational environments prepare children to perform or at least recognize forms of public speaking associated with citizenship, and these forms are an important part of childhood language socialization (Milani 2015; Reynolds and Chun 2013). Further, youth groups like

86  |  Latinos in Israel the Scouts are historically important for teaching children the otherwise abstract forms of participation in civil society (S. Anderson 2011, 322–23). As Ritty Lukose (2005, 524) puts it succinctly, a scholarly “literature on modern education and schooling has highlighted the importance of such sites for the constitution of citizens in the public spheres of modern nation-states.” T. H. Marshall, the famous liberal theorist of citizenship, also addressed this issue when he broke citizenship up into bundles of rights, separating out social rights (rights to social standing and social services, like schooling), civil rights (rights to individual freedom, like freedom of speech), and political rights (rights to participate in wielding power, like voting).7 Writing about the social right of education, Marshall explained that there is a difference between schooling and legislation that protects children from harsh labor conditions. In this vein, writes Marshall (1950, 25): [the state] is trying to stimulate the growth of citizens in the making. The right to education is a genuine social right of citizenship, because the aim of education during childhood is to shape the future adult. Fundamentally, it should be regarded, not as the right of children to go to school, but the right of the adult citizen to have been educated.

By putting it this way, Marshall showed that, from a liberal perspective, education is essential to participating in the public sphere, that is (to use his terms), it is a social right that conditions the actual wielding of civil rights, like the freedom of speech. For my purposes, Marshall’s points enable a discussion of how education also involves public performances where children can display the necessary “culture” to claim citizenship. That is, the terms of cultural politics—the mobilizing of ideas about a universal hierarchy of undifferentiated “whole” cultures—play a central role here. Latino children’s participation in youth organizations helped to create the sense that they are part of the Israeli political community (in Arendt’s sense, 2000, 31–46). Yet this sense was not easily achieved. As Latino leaders and concerned Israelis both realized, Latino families suffered from multiple forms of marginalization, all of which severely limited their ability to participate in public. Youth and other organizations interpreted this marginalization as a question of culture, and thus cultural performances were understood as a starting point for welfare and activism among Latinos.

La Escuelita: Niños que no son de aquí ni de allá The urban geography of south Tel Aviv serves as an important backdrop for the social welfare activities of La Escuelita and Eitan Troop. Especially prior to 2002, when the Immigration Police were instituted, many if not most Latinos lived in the southern neighborhoods of Tel Aviv, around the Central Bus Station.8 In the

Inculcating Citizenship | 87 late nineties, these neighborhoods were exceptional for the high concentration of foreign-born residents: in the press many remarked on the people and businesses of Southeast Asian countries (especially Thailand and the Philippines), Eastern European countries (especially Romania, Moldova, and Belarus), West African countries (especially Nigeria and Ghana), and also Latin American countries. More recently, several thousand East African asylum seekers have also made their homes in these neighborhoods, creating tensions with many Jewish residents (N. Cohen and Margalit 2015; Shapiro 2013). Latino families lived among these many other “foreign workers,” as well as more long-standing groups of Mizrahi Jews, Palestinian citizens, and immigrants from the central Asian regions of the former Soviet Union. Not all households in the southern neighborhoods, nor all Latino households, were equally marginalized, nor were they all impoverished. However, Latinos households were included in the kinds of state policies that targeted these disadvantaged residents. Although in 2018 many of these neighborhoods were undergoing intense gentrification, in the early 2000s the largely Ashkenazi Israeli middle class, living in the north, considered these neighborhoods among the least desirable areas to live. Many of the buildings around the Central Bus Station area were run-down and rent was cheap. Indeed, low rent and the excellent access to public transportation were what attracted so many labor migrants to live there. Besides the evident poverty in the built environment, the area in the mid-2000s was also known as one of Tel Aviv’s de facto red-light districts, with many brothels operating openly along with all manner of peep shows and adult stores. The bright neon signs on Neve Sha’anan Street had become emblematic of this zone for middle-class Israelis, and images of them were used in films depicting foreign workers.9 La Escuelita formed in an effort by the municipality to bring services to the highly diverse population of south Tel Aviv. At the forefront of this welfare project was the municipal organization known by the acronym mesila (track), founded in 1999 to help the noncitizen populations, about 9 percent of the city’s residents.10 Mesila would confer on La Escuelita a certain amount of state recognition and enable its mission to gain greater traction among Latinos. The municipality defined the role of this new organization as apolitical, even though, through extending services to these noncitizens, it essentially “play[ed] a central role in transforming migrants into ‘urban citizens,’ that is, legitimate rights-bearing subjects within the local society” (Kemp and Raijman 2004, 42). Staffed mostly by social workers, it provided some inspection and training for home nurseries; it helped refer labor migrants to experts like psychologists and school tutors; it organized meetings between municipal authorities and labor migrant leadership; it dispensed information about schools; and the like. Mesila worked with a Colombian named Cristina to found La Escuelita in 2000, and Cristina became its first director. She explained her intentions by

88  |  Latinos in Israel asking a question many Latino parents ask themselves: how can Latino kids growing up in Israel be Latin American, especially given the difficulties facing Latino parents? Cristina posed this question in a moving but unfinished eleventhousand-word personal memoir she left behind.11 Cristina arrived from a town close to Armenia, Colombia, in 1993 and left in 2003, before I had the chance to meet her. Her Spanish-language memoir goes through her decision to move to Israel, and the kinds of problems she encountered trying to raise a child in Israel as a single mother and unauthorized immigrant. For example, when her sister brought Cristina’s son to Israel a year after Cristina’s arrival, Cristina felt she could no longer maintain the long hours of cleaning houses, which she described as part of “that race after money.” So Cristina set up a nursery to care for children, her son included, and there she witnessed the significant difficulties of Latino parents. Cristina’s memoir describes the great frustrations in setting up La Escuelita and maintaining the interest and commitment of teachers, parents, and children. At the same time, she realized the marginalization she and other Latinos faced in Israel contributed to these problems. I quote her (Spanish) memoir at length to show how she tied these welfare problems to the question of culture, and why providing a space like La Escuelita was so important: children [of Latinos] who spend long days in daycares or alone, children who don’t have a lot of contact with their parents, parents who work many hours, because that’s why they came and sometimes they have to maintain two families, the new one and the one they abandoned, they forget that their children need them, that these are very important years for the emotional growth and development of children, in general they [parents] do not understand this, their children need to confront problems of adaptation, the large majority children without fathers or with deported fathers, children who at an early age already know how to speak of work permits, visas and deportations, children whose parents are strangers in the country, who don’t know the language, marginalized children, their culture is neither of the country nor of their parents’, children who are not from here nor from there (niños que no son de aquí ni de allá).

Cristina’s description of their marginalization ends in the question of how the children’s behavior in Israel shows problems of Latin American cultural reproduction in domestic spaces.12 Culture and language are important to Cristina’s take on the problems Latinos’ households faced: Latino kids are maladjusted not only because their parents are overworked and are left with little time and energy for them, but also because, in her view, Latinos are culturally alienated in Israel. The conditions under which Latino parents labored are partially responsible for this alienation, but not entirely. The result, according to this analysis, is that parents

Inculcating Citizenship | 89 become estranged from their own children, and cannot properly socialize them in Latin American culture. At the same time, from Cristina’s perspective, the children cannot truly be Israeli as they do not have Jewish descent. Thus she concludes that Latino children are neither “from here nor from there.” That is, in this view, Latino children end up with no culture to help them overcome their marginalization. This was a principal reason that La Escuelita was intended from the beginning to operate not only as a place for Latinos to receive Spanish-language instruction and share cultural celebrations, but also as a place for Latino families to get help and to gather together. As Barak Kalir (2010, 124–25) notes, most families sent their children to La Escuelita because it was an affordable afterschool activity. During my fieldwork, some 40 to 50 children between the ages of 5 and 15 were registered, although a smaller number showed up in any given week. Often forced to move in the two years I spent there as a volunteer, the school was always located in the south Tel Aviv area where most Latinos lived. The mission of preparing Latino children for their parents’ supposed return to their home countries amounted to emphasizing two practices: first, socializing Latino children in reading and writing standard Spanish, and second, teaching them about, and celebrating with them, major Latin American holidays, especially New Year’s and Mothers’ Day.13 These celebrations were public, with children performing for their families, and, in the case of the spring Festival fund-raiser, many Israelis were invited as well. La Escuelita was not the first time a Latino organization had performed the function of teaching Spanish or Latin American public culture. Many people told me that at an earlier time, churches and Latino day care centers had organized less elaborate programs along similar patterns.14 However, La Escuelita changed the model of organization because it was developed in coordination with a state social work agency, Mesila, which helped La Escuelita become one of the points of entry for Latinos to a web of social work and health providers that worked in south Tel Aviv. Part of La Escuelita’s mandate for welfare intervention was to help the gendered precarity of many Latino households. Parents were called las mamás (the moms) because most were single mothers due to a bureaucracy long biased toward deporting men, and also due to the matrilocal tendency of children of separated Latino couples to remain with their mother.15 For example, in the 2004–2005 school year, 27 mothers and 9 fathers were La Escuelita parents. Since most of the mothers were working long hours as the only wage-earner, Escuelita’s staff considered them to be a group “in crisis.” In response to this crisis, La Escuelita cast a fatherly kind of relation to las mamás. As Diego Manuel put it at the very first meeting that I attended with the teachers, the children would look to the male teachers of La Escuelita as father figures, since so many of them had seen their fathers deported. Many teachers,

90  |  Latinos in Israel including myself, helped counsel the mothers and also mediate relations between mothers and various state and nonstate institutions. This idea of fatherhood was not further elaborated on, although many practices helped to emphasize the esteem many Latinos maintained for mothers. One of the major celebrations was Mothers’ Day, which was very well attended in the two years that I volunteered. For the celebration, mothers were called up to receive a rose and other gifts from their child, who prepared cards and were taught to recite a few lines of love for their mothers.16 There was no parallel emphasis on Fathers’ Day. Finally, during La Escuelita’s Festival, much of the performance was geared to pleasing las mamás. For example, in the second year, another of the young male teachers and I were asked to dress provocatively as babies. This performance produced raucous laughter from las mamás, who joked that we would do a striptease. La Escuelita’s administrators also understood Latinos’ loss of culture in gendered terms. Spanish-language instruction was part of La Escuelita’s answer. Spanish was described as the lengua maternal (maternal language) of Latino children, and Latino children were perceived as losing Spanish. More importantly, children were losing the ability to communicate with las mamás effectively.17 For example, Cristina laments throughout her memoir how Latino children would speak Hebrew between them, and that “it was practically impossible for them to speak a clean Spanish without using a large amount of words in Hebrew.” For La Escuelita’s staff, teaching Spanish to Latino kids was part of social activism, influenced by Israeli interpreters of the radical pedagogy of Paulo Freire.18 The staff of La Escuelita met monthly with an important Israeli expert, Miguel, who also based his approach on Freire. During a seminar he gave to teachers, Miguel explained how Latino kids were in crisis, living in a society that rejects them and their families. Further, he discussed how the culture of Israeli schools and the large commercial media comprises the hegemonic culture of the Israeli middle class, leading children to see contradictions between that culture and their homes. Meanwhile, the parents themselves had not achieved upward mobility, and so they tended to assume that their children would also fail. Hebrew, Miguel continued, then becomes a symbol of the society that rejects Latinos, while Spanish is a symbol of the denigrated Latin American culture. This set of conflicts meant that children were not motivated to learn the language of their parents, and parents were not motivated to push their children to learn Spanish. Part of the role of education, Miguel told us, was to help create a consciousness of the context that produced these conflicts, and thus make possible overcoming its alienating outcomes. Teaching in Spanish was meant to produce a different kind of conflict, one that confronts this context and helps raise Latinos’ awareness. In practice, La Escuelita achieved these goals by exposing Latino children to the volunteer teachers. In years previous to my fieldwork, many if not most of the teachers were unauthorized immigrants, and at some points, they even

Inculcating Citizenship | 91 received a small sum for their trouble. However, the arrests of teachers in the summer of 2004 largely ended the participation of those with no way to avoid deportation. During my time volunteering there, all teachers and volunteers had some form of legal status, or at least were noncitizens who could avoid deportation (e.g., thanks to an ongoing asylum case). The teachers were a changing mix of Latino unauthorized immigrants, Latin American immigrants (especially Argentineans), Spanish-speaking Israelis with some relation to Latin America, or sometimes even Europeans with limited Spanish who were passing through. The contradictions inherent in staff class, race, and status positions were evident in interactions with the children, and to a lesser extent with their parents. Teachers often complained about the behavior of Latino children, blaming Israeli “culture” for the lack of respect shown in classroom behavior. For example, on her first day, an Argentinean Jewish immigrant reported she was exhausted after an hour, which she had spent trying to gain control over the class. Her surprise was based partially on the expectations about the respect owed a teacher and adult that meant pupils would not act without instructions. The issue of gaining control of the classroom was constantly discussed by teachers, even with some sense that the problems of focus and attention were a product of the Latino kids’ marginalization. In staff meetings, Miguel answered ongoing complaints that a balance had to be struck between reproaching them and allowing some of their maleducación, their “rudeness.” For this reason, educating children in manners, or educación, never became an objective of the program.19 The contradictions of class and status were especially apparent in concerns about the motivation and commitment of children, families, and also staff. For this reason, the nominal fees paid by parents or the funds raised during the festival were used to help motivate the pupils: they were taken once a year to the movies or a children’s theater, and also received presents during Christmas. Often these outings involved a meal at a fast food restaurant, like McDonald’s. Staff also received perks to keep up morale, like going on La Escuelita trips for free (while families had to pay), or free training in pedagogy. Teaching Spanish language was not only a form of social activism and welfare intervention. It was also supposed to resolve tensions that teachers saw in the lives of Latino families. For example, several purposes were discussed in an early (2003) text about La Escuelita’s objectives, written in Spanish. Besides preparing children for their “return” to Latin America, the text set out as an objective the promotion of interaction between parents and children. Spanish and Latin American culture were “tools” meant to “improve family communication by teaching children the culture of their parents.” In practice, not surprisingly, children’s instruction in standard Spanish came out most clearly when teachers sought to limit “mixing.” Since discipline was purposefully lax, often teachers really just gave a register lesson in commensuration

92  |  Latinos in Israel between Latin American and Israeli forms. That is, they taught Latino kids that what they said with Hebrew forms could also be said with Spanish forms. For example, when I received my class, Diego Manuel gave me instructions on what I might try to achieve with them for the year. He told me that the kids already knew basic reading and writing in Spanish, but that we would need to work on vocabulary, since many do not know the Spanish words and consequently formulate utterances like “vegetables are bought in the shuk” (instead of mercado, “market”), “the hammer is bought in the om senter” (instead of ferretería, “hardware store”), or “something else is bought in the super” (instead of supermercado, “supermarket”). These lexical replacements in essence showed the commensuration between the Spanish and Hebrew forms.20 Ultimately, La Escuelita’s teachers did not really police language use among children, because they feared undercutting motivation. Children almost always spoke Hebrew between themselves during recreational breaks. However, such lessons in language commensuration were important to a larger project of making Latino cultural difference intelligible to the kids as part of a wider array of cultural or ethnic backgrounds found among Israelis (see Domínguez 1989). That is, the public culture that La Escuelita inculcated was one that worked well in terms of broader Israeli practices of acceptable difference. This aspect of cultural commensuration was most evident in the performances of El Festival.

El Festival Folklórico y Cultural: The Public Commensuration of Difference Probably the most important kind of instruction given Latino kids at La Escuelita was the preparation for the holiday performances. These were the times that las mamás and their children saw themselves in public. Teachers began a few weeks in advance, often with great haste, to teach their pupils songs and humorous acts. Outside of La Escuelita time, a group of mamás worked with small groups of children, teaching them folkloric dances from their countries of origin. Although el Festival was ostensibly a celebration of Latin American culture, it was at the same time an important manner in which Latinos were offering this “culture” to Israelis for their recognition. It was, to take a term from Brackette Williams (1989, 1991), an “ethnicizing” move, one where Latino racialized differences were publicly performed as safe for Israeli consumption. It helped Latinos appear as a community (Urciuoli 1996, 18–39), commensurate with immigrant groups in Israel. The highlight event of the year was undoubtedly the spring festival and fundraiser, formally named El Festival Folklórico y Cultural, but generally referred to simply as el Festival. For el Festival, La Escuelita invited a broad range of Latinos as well as sympathetic Israelis to attend a six-hour medley of performances by the pupils and teachers. The appeal to a Hebrew-speaking Israeli audience meant

Inculcating Citizenship | 93 translating for them—making the Latino cultural display commensurable with the other forms of difference available in Tel Aviv. Staff prepared advertising and formal invitations in Hebrew to send out. In the 2005 version, the Hebrew name was festival hashnati lefolklor vetarbut drom amerikai’im: Annual Festival of South American Folklore and Culture.21 The Hebrew version, that is, gave more information than the Spanish version. For a Hebrew-reading audience, the region of the folklore and culture that could be consumed was specified. Unlike the other celebrations, el Festival was a performance by La Escuelita for a broader audience of Latinos and Israelis who were not specifically involved in La Escuelita. Invitations and announcements went out through mobile phone text message and email through the networks of the staff, and printed versions were also handed out at staff workplaces. Latino salsa clubs and churches also passed along the information. Some businesses helped to sponsor the event, like a travel agency (Unigiros) often used by Latinos to remit money to family in Latin America. La Escuelita was putting on a performance for an Israeli public, and this was the key event to producing a sense of Latinos as a distinct ethnic community within the Israeli social landscape. Outside of Latinos, the audience for this event was not actually large, but it did represent the attempt by Latinos to share their cultural differences with the Israelis who came. In order to raise funds, las mamás prepared and sold food, and staff sold raffle tickets. Funds raised were relatively significant, topping 4000 NIS (about US$1000), and were used for the welfare aspect of La Escuelita’s mission by taking kids to a movie or tours. At the same time, the sale of food and performance accorded with widespread Israeli views about Latin American culture as a commodity. Citing a study by a social demographer, Barak Kalir (2010, 5) describes this association as a question of similarity: “For their part, Israelis often expressed positive images of Latinos, singling them out for being ‘more like us.’ Israelis tended to associate Latinos with favorable contributions to Israeli culture, referring to Latinos’ passion for football, music, food, and ‘lively and open lifestyle.’” It produced a sense of Latino culture—food, dance, music, Spanish language—that could easily fit within Israeli publicness, and one that did not challenge the basic limitations on who or what is an Israeli. El Festival of spring 2005, in front of a crowd of some 300, exemplified how Latino difference was prepared for Israeli publicness. Diego Manuel was, as always, the master of ceremonies, or to use the typical term for the role, animador.22 One of his chief roles was to connect with the Hebrew-speaking audience as much as the Spanish-speaking Latino audience. The relationship with the audience was achieved in multiple ways. First of all was the list of thankyous that Diego Manuel conferred as the event opened, and as it progressed. Throughout el Festival, Diego Manuel spoke in both Spanish and Hebrew, and where he had prepared his script in advance, it was in both languages. He had

94  |  Latinos in Israel translated the Hebrew version from the Spanish and then had someone go over it (usually his Israeli partner), so that it was in an appropriately formal register. After opening with la orden del día (program or meeting agenda), Diego Manuel explained the purpose of La Escuelita, first in Spanish and then in Hebrew: to prepare children to return to Latin America. However, on finishing the Hebrew explanation, Diego Manuel continued speaking Hebrew and launched into spontaneous acknowledgments. In a display of public educación (ethical conduct or politeness), Diego Manuel looked out at the audience, picking out people who should be acknowledged, and thus gave thanks to the broader public that had come: I want to thank the Colombian consul who is here with us, the staff from the Cervantes Institute who are also here with us, and also the staff from the American Alliance Institute who are also here with us, and also the staff of Unigiros who are also here with us, all the friends that came, all the students from the American Alliance Institute, all the students from the Cervantes Institute, and all the people who came to enjoy themselves, to be with us, and to contribute today to our project.

Impromptu, these acknowledgments were only done in Hebrew. In a sense, they did not have to be done in Spanish, since they signaled the staff’s role in bringing a supportive set of organizations from outside of Latino Tel Aviv to recognize the Latino presence in Tel Aviv. On a small scale, La Escuelita was producing Latino culture as part of Israeli publicness. Those were not the last thank-yous. Diego Manuel continued to produce a sense of this safe Latino difference when, in the first item from la orden del día, he gave his opening words in two versions. First in Spanish and then in Hebrew, Diego Manuel began with a few figures about La Escuelita: 12 volunteers, 41 pupils originating from 7 countries that are separated into 6 classes. Then he thematized Latinos’ deportability by mentioning the numbers of parents: 27 mothers and 7 fathers. To quote from the Hebrew version, Diego Manuel explained: “That’s not a mathematical mistake, that’s the result of a decision, and I’ve long since lost count of the number deported.” Yet, echoing the gratitude he had expressed for the audience only a few minutes earlier, Diego Manuel then went on to thank the State of Israel and the Israeli people (quoting again from the Hebrew version): But despite those numbers, today in La Escuelita we don’t want to complain in front of those who came to be in our company and participate in our festival. . . . I think that, with the years, we learn that it’s not worth complaining, it’s better to look at the good things we received. Therefore today, in addition to thanking the volunteers, the mothers, the children, the representatives of our countries, this audience which is with us today, and all the people who always help us so that La Escuelita will continue to exist, I want to thank this state, Israel, the holy land, because this is the state that helped us to realize our

Inculcating Citizenship | 95 dreams, to discover new worlds, to discover another culture, this is the state that received us, when the economic or political situation in our states forced us to abandon them. With all the problems that this brought us, Israel and its people were a very important part of what we are today. Therefore, from all my heart I want to thank this people, I want to declare this festival, more than a Latin American cultural meeting, a meeting of cultures. One culture, human culture.

Diego Manuel moves from describing the tragic difficulty of living as unauthorized immigrants to a gratitude that connects the core roles of La Escuelita (“the volunteers, the mothers, the children”) to the roles of people and organizations who frame and aid La Escuelita and mediate the relation of Latinos to collective actors (“the representatives of our countries, the audience . . . the people who always help us”) and then all the way to the State of Israel and the people of Israel, “that received us.” After designating these relations through his gratitude, Diego Manuel restates the relation as a cultural one, where on the one hand, Latin American culture will be on display for Israelis, and on the other hand, the differences can be neutralized (“one culture, human culture”). This meeting of cultures, which is only one culture, was then represented in the next item, the “folkloric parade” (desfile folklórico). Here, seven countries were represented by groups of mamás and children dressed in national costume entering the stage from one side, carrying the flag of that country, while the respective national anthem played. The representatives of each Latin American country entered in alphabetical order: Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. Israel was also represented, with a young cousin of Diego Manuel’s partner carrying the flag, although not dressed in any special way. Uneven in number, the representative groups then stood in front of the audience, producing a composite sign (or diagram) of the performance of all cultures as one (see figure 3.1). Despite the imbalance in sizes of the contingents, the full effect was to perform a publicness, a public expression, of cultural commensuration. The overall message, so to speak, was “our Latino culture” is equal to the Israeli culture, and exists as part of Israeli public life. The rest of el Festival repeated in different ways the same kinds of messages about folkloric and national cultural performances enabling the unity of all present, including the audience. However, most of the performances were in Spanish, with only casual attempts by Diego Manuel to explain in Hebrew. Further, as the event continued, many people began leaving, and it became less an event for a general audience and much more internal to La Escuelita’s own regular participants. The final event, the breaking of the piñata (represented on the cover too), also reinforced the initial message of the unity of those who gathered within Israeli publicness. The piñata was made by a Jewish Israeli of Ecuadorian descent, who

96  |  Latinos in Israel

Figure 3.1 La Escuelita’s 2005 Festival at the end of the Folklore Parade. Visible from left to right are flags of Israel, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, and Bolivia. The flags of Argentina and Chile, to the right, are not visible. Source: Author.

was a regular volunteer at La Escuelita. At the top of the piñata were two Israeli flags, like a roof over flags of seven Latin American countries (Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela), as well as the flag of Spain (see figure 3.2).23 The piñata at the end of such events, whether a large event like el Festival or a smaller one like a birthday, always produced a frenzy of children and sometimes adults too, jockeying for position to pick up as many candies or toys as possible. Like raffles, the piñata is a miniature ritual that enacts contingencies and turns of fortune. Here, as Diego Manuel had said in his opening words, the turns of fortune occurred by arriving in Israel. The piñata’s design helped to compose and reinforce that public message. El Festival comprised a public performance of folklore and culture that enabled, on the one hand, highly marginalized and racialized Latino families to see themselves in public, and on the other hand, an Israeli audience to see them. The Latino audience blended with the Israeli, in a show of unity. From the perspective of the volunteer staff of La Escuelita, this audience stood in for a much broader Israeli nation, as Diego Manuel made clear in his opening words, which were prepared to be presented in both Spanish and Hebrew. This strategic

Inculcating Citizenship | 97

Figure 3.2 La Escuelita’s piñata for el Festival of 2005. Under the two Israeli flags at the top are, from top to bottom and left to right: Peru, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Argentina. On the other side and not visible in the photo are the flags of Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Spain. Source: Author.

98  |  Latinos in Israel performance of bilingualism was an attempt to neutralize the distinction between Latinos and Israelis more generally (see Woolard 1998). El Festival produced a composite sign, where audience and performers were meant to stand in for the way that Latinos generally hoped their cultural difference would come to be accepted in Israel: as culture that could be equal to, and absorbed in, Israeli public culture. Equally important, this message was meant to signal that Latinos were worthy of citizenship. El Festival did not garner enough media attention to really amplify that message, however. On the other hand, Latinos’ participation in the Israeli Scouts eventually would.

Latino Scouting in South Tel Aviv Tucked behind the Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv, on the opposite side from the neon signs of the red-light district, is the Eitan compound. Along with public schools and municipal day care centers, the Scouts at Eitan comprised one of the many sites where Latino children were formally socialized into Israeli public culture, especially its official, nationalist version.24 Here, unlike La Escuelita, little if any attention was paid to different diasporic origins. Instead, much of the programming at Eitan reinforced hegemonic nationalist ideas about the relation of populations, territory, and ethnolinguistic categories. At the same time, Latino youth faced a constant reminder of their own marginalization, especially when interacting with Eitan’s administrators as well as their more motivated and wealthier counterparts who were bused in from north Tel Aviv. The Israeli Scouts have long played an important role in establishing hegemonic public culture. The movement was founded as part of the colonial link to the British during the period of Mandate Palestine and sought to promote citizenship with an emphasis on the virtues of pioneering, like settlement and soldiering.25 Further, as Tamar Katriel (1987, 445) summarizes, participating in such organizations was considered crucial to national belonging: The centrality of the youth movement ethos in the development of modern Israeli culture is widely recognized, as is summarily acknowledged in a retrospective account by a well-known literary critic [Gershon Shaked], who went as far as to say: “Anybody who wanted to belong to the new Israeli culture had to accept the rules of the game formulated within the youth movement culture.”

Moreover, youth movements helped promote a sense that children are born of the nation rather than of their parents’ (exilic) past (Zerubavel 1995, 26–31). Today, the Israeli Scouts are mostly urban, and make up the largest youth movement in Israel with about 80,000 members. Associated largely with the upscale neighborhoods of Tel Aviv, the Scouts have expanded their work with marginalized youth since the early 2000s, after a grave financial and moral

Inculcating Citizenship | 99 crisis.26 Busing in counselors from more established troops in the wealthier parts of Tel Aviv was part of the program to expand the Scouts to new areas as part of a social commitment (netina xevratit). At Eitan, a relatively small troop, this commitment was also felt in the large financial support from the central Scouts administration, as well as donations from charitable associations. The funding helped them to subsidize scouts from low-income families to participate in the more expensive programs, like summer camps. Such programs helped in Eitan’s goal of keeping neighborhood kids “off the street.” At the same time, this social commitment to Eitan reproduced a longstanding racialized class divide. About half the counselors at Eitan were “internal,” meaning their home troop was Eitan, and they lived in or close to the southern neighborhood of Shapira. The rest were “external,” meaning they were bused in from the wealthy northern Tel Aviv neighborhood of Tsahala in an effort to buttress the smaller Eitan. While the internal Eitan counselors were mostly noncitizen Latinos as well as a few working-class Mizrahi Jews, the external Tsahala counselors were almost entirely middle- and upper-class Ashkenazi Jews.27 The Scouts’ social policy of busing thus crossed and reproduced a long-standing north-south boundary in Tel Aviv, which is correlated and associated with the race and class lines of Ashkenazi versus Mizrahi (N. Cohen and Margalit 2015; Marom 2014). Further, the Tsahala youth came from the type of household that employed Latino adults as domestic workers.28 The class and race differences led to many open tensions, which Latino kids tied to citizenship. Interestingly, Eitan’s relaunching in the early 2000s was connected to La Escuelita. Eitan used to be a religious troop, but after suffering from dwindling numbers, it reopened in 2002 as a secular one.29 One of the early coordinators in the relaunched troop was Diego Manuel, who helped bring older Latino youth involved in La Escuelita to Eitan. (La Escuelita’s older Latino youth had been organized initially in an effort to prevent them getting involved in activities that were drawing the attention of the police.) La Escuelita’s part in the reestablishment of Eitan explains why, in 2005–2006 during my fieldwork with Eitan, most of the internal counselors were Latino. Further, in the fall of 2005, the Scouts’ support for the campaign for citizenship drew Latinos in increasing numbers to Eitan. The first Government Resolution providing a path to citizenship for the children of labor migrants was passed in June 2005, but it did not cover most of the noncitizen Latinos at Eitan. However, as I discuss in chapter 6, journalists quoted then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as saying he felt compelled to help foreign worker children after seeing a news item about Eitan Scouts (the news report included two Latinos that were not helped by the 2005 Resolution). When the Resolution did not actually cover the majority of the undocumented children, the heads of Eitan, in collaboration with the Israeli Scouts Central Administration, decided to support the campaign

100  |  Latinos in Israel for citizenship. Eitan’s administrators, with help from other organizations, took such steps as gathering the paperwork individuals would need to submit an application for citizenship. As Ariel Sharon’s report suggested, moreover, participation in the Scouts provided noncitizen youth the opportunity to say they contributed to society in ways that presaged military service. The khaki uniforms worn by scouts became an emblem of their dedication, as well as an initiation into uniformed public service. These multiple factors brought out more Latino children to Eitan in 2005, even some who had never participated before. However, Eitan’s goal of producing citizens in the hegemonic mold was challenged by the socioeconomic conditions of its scouts, by the logistics of running the troop, and by the tensions between northern and southern counselors. Besides serving an economically disadvantaged neighborhood, Eitan comprised a very untraditional mix of scouts, reflecting in part the multiethnic neighborhoods surrounding it as well as a history of different streams of migrations. During my fieldwork, most of the scouts in Eitan were Latino children or children of unauthorized immigrants of other backgrounds. Others were the children of recent, authorized immigrants from the central Asian republics of the former USSR, or of the remaining Mizrahi Jewish families from an earlier migration wave. A few scouts were Palestinian citizens, and it was rumored that their families originated from the Occupied Territories. The scout counselors had their work cut out for them to get this disparate group of underprivileged scouts to buy into the Scout mission. During the year I spent attending events regularly (September 2005 to June 2006), Yael, in her mid-thirties and finishing off a PhD, was the head of the troop. (The head of the troop looks after accounts and maintains contact with the central administration, but is not responsible for the day-to-day programming, which is left to a coordinator.) Of Persian descent, Yael was proud of her roots in the neighborhood and lived in a beautiful, relatively large house near the compound with her husband. Eitan Troop was important to her as part of her general commitment to the southern part of the city, and she also worked hard on the campaign for legal status for undocumented children. Yael was constantly trying to overcome the logistical issues that plagued the troop, issues that were important for motivating the children. The logistical problems started with the fairly modest structure that housed the troop, comprised of two small buildings that did not even include bathroom facilities (there was another building in the compound that belonged to a day care, which only gave partial access to bathrooms). Further, Eitan suffered from chronic understaffing and had difficulties getting children to come out to the activities. Multiple turnovers of coordinators during the initial two months in 2005 meant that the opening of the year had to be done again. Yael begged Scouts central administration to send a full-time coordinator. Motivation and agency were considered a

Inculcating Citizenship | 101 constant issue. Yael complained to me that the troop needed a coordinator that would motivate the kids, using the army slang leharil (literally, to poison).30 Ultimately, creating commitment meant bringing in administrators and counselors from middle-class areas of the country. Eventually, in 2005 two full-time coordinators of middle-class backgrounds were found for Eitan. Further, the external counselors from the north were necessary to ensure enough counselors for all the age groups. (This problem worsened when many of the internal counselors stopped coming at midyear, after a series of incidents during the December Hanukah trip.) Differences between the southern counselors and the northerners were explained culturally, as a lack of Scouts tradition in the south. This explanation echoed more widespread distinctions among socioeconomic groups, which speak of “veteran Israelis” (vatikim) and “new immigrants” (olim xadashim), and where veterans are considered more likely to achieve higher socioeconomic status.31 Eitan Troop thus institutionalized a set of middle-class mediators, who helped frame and also broker the embattled undocumented youth for an Israeli public. With coordinators and counselors in place, other logistical problems emerged, like motivating neighborhood children to come regularly to activities. Part of the answer to this problem involved publicly constituting the presence of Eitan throughout the neighborhood through well-advertised programming. For example, the staff helped plan a large purimon, Purim festival, with the local community center, where they built and ran three of the stations for local children. Such programming was considered to give the Scouts greater public visibility in the neighborhood—a link to the “community” (kehila). This public appeal to the neighborhood was also meant to help smooth over logistical issues as well as tensions between the northern and southern counselors. For example, in an effort to build “cohesion” (gibush) in the ranks of the counselors, a coordinator, Maya, in early Fall 2005 took them on a “preparation trip” (tiyul haxana) mostly directed at starting the year properly.32 She was very irritated about the “mess” that she saw at Eitan Troop as the new school year began. During the preparation trip, Maya had the counselors go through activities geared to think about how to recruit more scouts and have them sign up for the first trip of the year. The seminar included various esprit-building activities, including making “jutes” (yutot), huge banners made of burlap cloth, to attract scouts for the opening year trip. Maya explained that some of the activities were meant to get the counselors to think about how to infuse neighborhood children with reasons to join the Scouts.33 In other words, to improve the opening of the year, the seminar was designed to have counselors think of themselves in terms of neighborhood publicness. Despite these attempts at rallying the counselors through group gibush, racial and class divides repeatedly came out in everyday encounters and played

102  |  Latinos in Israel out in how the teenagers understood citizenship. During the preparation trip, northern and southern counselors constantly invoked racial and class stereotypes about each other. One common stereotype among kids from south Tel Aviv was that the wealthier Israelis were dumb or effeminate. On the other hand, kids from north Tel Aviv often saw their southern counterparts through the lens of long-standing racial types of violent thugs or hooligans, using terms like ars. ars (plural, arsim) is a highly derogatory term for working-class men, mostly of Mizrahi background, who are believed to be recognizable by their style of dress and speech (something like a “greaser” in the United States). Arsim are also reputed to be predators of various kinds. For example, George, a Latino teenager, had started to date Deborah, a northern teenager. At one point, George told her to stop being dumb, insisting that she did not understand because she is a tsfonit—meaning an Ashkenazi from the northern suburbs.34 At another point, George and one of the male external counselors were in the midst of one of the endless masculine verbal jousts, in this case about toughness, when the external counselor joked that “deborah has a tough boyfriend from shapira” (the southern neighborhood where Eitan is located). Later, two of the Latino counselors started speaking in Spanish in pointed ways against their northern counterparts, joking that “todos los ricos son homosexuales” (the rich are all homosexuals). Just as Latino counselors saw their northern counterparts as typical Israelis, the northern counselors also wondered about the abilities and character of their southern counterparts. Northern counselors explained to me that they signed up to work with Eitan not only as a commitment to help socially, but also because at their home troop they would rarely get a chance to take on prominent roles. One northerner, Eilat, told me that she had thought carefully about which southern troop to work with after her phone had been stolen during training at another southern compound. She chose Eitan, Eilat said, because it did not have too many “arsim.” Moments after she stated this, we were witness to an incident where one of the local counselors playfully fought with a nine-year-old girl, and, briefly pushing her backwards onto the lap of one of the female counselors, told her, “i’ll push you back to the cunt!” At that point, Eilat expressed her concern for how the southern counselors behaved, noting that they were less likely to come prepared for activities, and also that some of them spoke like arsim. Even a simple greeting—a polite display of educación (see chap. 2)—could bring into play these stereotypes, as well as questions of morality, belonging, and citizenship. I arrived one day at Eitan’s compound and greeted a mixed group of southern and northern counselors. Later, Earl, a counselor who arrived from Colombia at the age of ten, remarked to me with some irritation that Deborah (George’s northern girlfriend) did not greet me in return. “That’s how she always is,” he complained. On another occasion, while I chatted with some of

Inculcating Citizenship | 103 the counselors, Deborah walked in suddenly and demanded some paper that she needed “immediately.” Earl scoffed at her haste and her imperative tone, and as she left, Earl remarked “and it’s them who have citizenship,” meaning “them, the Jews.” From Earl’s perspective, Deborah’s lack of educación, her direct and imperious way of interacting with others—her chutzpah even—brought to the fore the question of belonging. “They,” the northern Tel Avivis, the tsfonim, do not know how to behave and yet they are recognized as belonging in Israel. “They” do not have to fear being deported. In essence, Earl was making a claim for citizenship that was unrecognizable under the conditions of his life. His moral claim linked citizenship to civil conduct, implying that those who know how to behave should have a legitimate claim to citizenship. Public interaction is often linked to civility and restraining violence (Warner 2002a; S. Anderson 2011, 321), and, as discussed in chapter  2, Earl’s comment on citizenship reflected typical Latino criticisms of Israeli behavior: “they” are rude and unrestrained. If the Scouts are preparing citizens, Earl’s comments suggest, then they should be citizens who recognize each other in respectful ways. Earl was intimating that civility—exchanging greetings, interrupting politely—should be an essential part of how citizens interact.

The Burning Issue of Citizenship in Eitan’s tekes esh Two weeks after Maya’s “preparation trip,” the postponed Fire Ceremony (tekes esh), meant to open the Scouts 2005–2006 year officially, was finally carried out, much to the satisfaction of Eitan’s administrators. As was traditional with youth movement fire ceremonies (Katriel 1987), the ritual was held in the open space directly outside of Eitan compound. Large stands were erected for the burning inscriptions of words and phrases, which in this case were meant also to attract a larger audience from the whole neighborhood. The Latino participants were being ritually placed into a national lineage that extended back to the “pioneering” Zionist settlers of Mandate Palestine. This performance also connected Latino counselors to the campaign for citizenship. Unlike La Escuelita’s Festival, here Latino difference was entirely muted. In this ritual space, the Latino participants were born to the Israeli nation. To achieve these ritual effects, the performance crucially depended on mobilizing the neighborhood for the Scouts. The ceremony was meant to show the counselors’ preparation as a performance to the whole neighborhood. Counselors had made phone calls to families and passed out flyers throughout the neighborhood, trying to increase registration. A huge banner was erected stating “year-opening trip with eitan.” A large Star of David, with blue and white cloth, was mounted as the backdrop to the stage (see figure 3.3), with dramatic spotlights helping to light it. In the center of the larger Star of David was a smaller

104  |  Latinos in Israel

Figure 3.3 The main stage at Eitan’s opening year Fire Ceremony (tekes esh) in November 2005. Fire inscriptions, off to both sides, are not visible. The three counselors on the left are from the external troop, Tsahala, and the three on the right are Latinas from the internal troop, Eitan. Source: Author.

one, draped with the flags of Israel and the Scouts. Paper bags with lighted candles marked off the stage, and a large sound system amplified the voices of the speakers. Large structures held multiple inscriptions, which were lit on fire in turn: in shapira there are scouts, eitan empire, and the like. Also part of the set of burning inscriptions was the caricature face of the Scouts holding up three fingers. As each inscription was set on fire, the audience cheered and guessed at the words. The link between the campaign for citizenship and the public performance for the neighborhood was made in several ways. First, for every phase of the ceremony, both an external and an internal counselor participated. For example, in figure 3.3, three Tsahala external counselors on the left and three Latina internal Eitan counselors on the right form a symmetry. This symmetry positions the “veteran” citizen next to the unauthorized immigrant and not-yet citizen, both wearing uniforms that emblematize national service—producing a composite sign of Scouts inclusion. Still, as the ceremony unfolded, distinctions emerged. Formally, both a northern counselor and a southern counselor emceed the event, yet it was the more articulate northern counselor, with excellent formal Hebrew, who ended

Inculcating Citizenship | 105 up doing most of the announcements. At the outset of the ceremony, it was this northern counselor who explained the Scouts’ welfare role in Shapira. After addressing the audience as “scouts, parents, honored guests, and esteemed neighborhood residents,” she stated: Eitan Troop sets its objective to promote among the troop’s children the values of responsibility and social participation. In addition, the center of activities revolves around values like friendship, equality, giving, personal fulfillment, and Zionism.

The northern counselor read the prepared formal statement without a glitch, supremely confident. Besides the middle-class Ashkenazi accent, she had no trouble handling the higher register, which included rarefied formulations as well as syntactic structures rarely used in colloquial interaction.35 On the other hand, her southern counterpart had more trouble reading her lines, tripping over some of the formalities of the register. The southern counselor also had a noticeable nonstandard accent. The composite sign of the fire ceremony thus also ended up positioning the northern counselors as a frame for the southern Latino counselors: the northern counselors played the role of the veteran citizens who can guide the new citizens(-to-be). The explicit link to the campaign for citizenship was made by Yael, the director of Eitan. In her opening words, Yael stated that the June 2005 Government Resolution for citizenship for the children of labor migrants did not cover many of the scouts at Eitan. Then, she used a (Hebrew) term, “cultural exile,” that had become ubiquitous when discussing the possible deportation of these children. She intoned dramatically (in Hebrew): “for half of the scouts . . . the meaning of this resolution is cultural exile. For Eitan Troop, the end.”36 Then Yael explained how Eitan and the Israeli Scouts were planning to push for a government amendment to the 2005 Resolution, namely by helping the noncitizen scouts to prepare files to take to the Ministry of Interior:37 In the coming days the troop’s scouts and their parents will submit applications for citizenship. And I hope that the Ministry of Interior’s staff will take the time to study the faces that peer out from the report cards and certificates of excellence that you received at school, the photos from scouts, and will understand that complete lives were built here, that you do not have another country. I hope that at the end of this year, when we leave for the summer programs, we’ll be able to do it all together, as ordinary and equal citizens, with rights and duties.

Yael here enters the role of the advocate, adding this appeal to the performance of the Fire Ceremony. First, she mentions the files that the scouts would submit as part of the policy for recognizing children. These files had a double purpose, first to provide documentation about the continuous domicile (merkaz xayim)

106  |  Latinos in Israel of the child (e.g., with report cards), and second, to show that the children were growing up as part of Jewish Israeli society (e.g., with photos from the Scouts), and therefore not in Palestinian nor foreign environments. By stating “you do not have another country,” Yael connects the files to the popular song “I Have No Other Country” (eyn li erets axeret), which signifies that one shows a commitment to Israel despite its problems. Later, a Latina counselor echoed Yael’s invocation of this song by reading a well-known column written by a television star (now turned politician), Yair Lapid, that focuses on how he loves Israel despite its drawbacks. The Fire Ceremony continued by emphasizing the Scouts’ virtues that were mentioned by the northern emcee. However, at no point did anyone mention the different background of the Latino counselors who participated. Unlike La Escuelita’s Festival, which produced Latino difference in commodified form, the Fire Ceremony projected these Latinos—representative of Latinos all over—as part of the Israeli nation. Latinos here appear in public not as Latinos but simply as Israelis—born to the nation, not to their parents’ past. The claim to citizenship is made clear by Yael’s invocation of popular culture as she addressed Latino noncitizens: “you do not have any other country.”

Conclusion La Escuelita and Eitan Scout Troop drew on different traditions of public culture—pan–Latin American versus Israeli—in their attempts to socialize Latino children of southern Tel Aviv. Yet both were united in the attempt to provide an embattled population with the means to overcome their marginality. Both were united in their connected history as places for Latino youth and families to gather. As in other cases of activism (Cody 2013; Greenberg 2014), La Escuelita and Eitan Troop sought to remake these subaltern subjects by preparing them to inhabit authoritative forms of publicness. That is, both youth organizations were united in their understanding that socialization into public culture was vital to the project of constituting motivated and moral citizens out of Latino youth. Cristina explained the founding of La Escuelita as a means to deal with the chasm that had appeared between Latino children, too often left alone, and their overworked parents. Teaching and valorizing Spanish was supposed to bridge that chasm and help Latino children to identify with their parents’ past. Exposing Latino children to Latin American public culture, that is, was meant to help buttress parents’ authority. In the case of the Scouts, administrators and Latino youth alike attributed the difference in commitment between the northern and southern counselors to the southerners’ lack of a scouting tradition. The claim about lacking tradition mirrors the distinction made between “veteran” and “new” immigrants in Israel, which is often cited as a reason for the differences in socioeconomic standing. That is, both La Escuelita

Inculcating Citizenship | 107 and Eitan Troop hoped to dampen the fierce racial and class marginalization faced by Latino youth by acting as mediators to the Israeli public sphere. These kinds of efforts would prove vital to the success of the campaign for citizenship. In terms of interpreting the help they received, Latino children and teenagers often found themselves still feeling alienated. The constant comparison to the highly motivated northern counselors put them on the defensive. The veteran northerners represented a kind of citizenship that “new immigrant” Latino youth could not inhabit. Interestingly, as Earl’s comments about Deborah’s lack of educación show, Latino ambivalence about Israeli interactional practices could be invoked to describe the difference in another way: it is the veteran Israelis who do not show the correct moral behavior. Moreover, this chapter highlights the constant friction and struggles to constitute Latinos as subjects that can inhabit Israeli publicness in roles associated with citizenship. These kinds of friction and struggles are center stage as the book moves to considering the multiple forms of public interaction that surrounded Latinos. In the next chapter, I turn to considering how Latinos saw their public marginality in the form of chisme—gossip.

Notes 1. A large literature argues that the sense of rupture associated with diaspora—dwelling in displacement, as Clifford (1994) put it—is something that is achieved through situated practices, and not something that merely happens due to expulsion or migration. See, among others, Brubaker (2005), Butler (2001), Eisenlohr (2006), Habib (2004), Shukla (2001), Yelvington (2001), and Zeleza (2005). I have discussed these issues more in Paz (2015a). 2. Eitan is also a common masculine name in Israel. 3. The organizations in this web included state schools, the municipal social work program, after-school programs, and child-care facilities. These organizations were run by a diverse group of people, from state-employed social workers to school administrators to liberal NGO advocates to anarchist communes. 4. In other words, I am interested in what linguistic anthropology calls the entextualizing practices, rather than assuming a set (denotational) text that is easily identified and taken out of the context of interaction. See M. Silverstein (1992, 1993, 1997) and Agha (2007a) for more on the distinction of denotational and interactional text. 5. See Alaina Lemon (2000, 21–27) and Kristina Wirtz (2014, 5–6) for excellent discussion of combining the analysis of performance with that of performativity, and also some of the problems with maintaining these two analytical traditions apart. 6. In chapter 6, I discuss how NGOs that advocated for the rights of noncitizen labor migrants did take up a public footing that resonates with Habermas’s description. 7. See the introduction for further discussion of Marshall’s points. 8. Especially the neighborhoods Hatikva, Shapira, Abu Kabir, Ezra, Yad Eliyahu, Kiryat Shalom, Neve Sha’anan, Florentine, and even in Kerem Hatemanim around Hakarmel market. Other Latinos still relatively close by were living in Jaffa and Holon.

108  |  Latinos in Israel 9. One example is the 2007 Israeli movie Noodle, which depicts an employer whose Chinese cleaner is deported suddenly, thus leaving behind her young son. In one scene the employer travels to the Central Bus Station area and discovers this unfamiliar world. 10. mesila is an acronym for merkaz siyu’a vemeyda lakehila hazara, formerly translated as “Aid and Information Center for the Foreign Community” (later, with a changing mandate, it became “Aid and Information Center for Migrant Workers and Refugees”). Its website is available through the Tel Aviv municipality’s site: https://www.tel​ -aviv.gov.il/Residents/HealthAndSocial/Pages/Mesila.aspx, accessed March 26, 2016. 11. I received this document, along with the whole archive of La Escuelita, from a later director. 12. I use the term reproduction here in light of Paul Willis’s (1981) classic distinctions of (familial) reproduction, social reproduction, cultural reproduction, as well as cultural production. See B. A. Levinson and Holland (1996) for a discussion of the importance of Willis’s discussion. 13. In addition, La Escuelita’s teachers taught older pupils about other common Latin American holidays, like el Día de La Raza (which generally seeks to observe a common heritage between Spain and Latin America). However, these other holidays were not marked by a more public commemoration. 14. For example, one Colombian mother told me that before La Escuelita existed she had sent her son to Spanish classes at the Catholic church, as part of preparing for first communion, and this also came up in a report on an Evangelical church. In her memoir, Cristina explained that she had set up Spanish language classes for children in 1995, first starting in her day care, with the help of the Colombian consulate. Another longtime Colombian resident told me that years earlier she had taught young children Colombian folkloric dances and music in the day care she used to run with her mother. 15. This tendency was also reproduced in the transnational strategies used for childrearing, since the norm was to leave children in Latin America with the maternal grandparents, especially the grandmother. 16. The importance of Mothers’ Day was also recognized with special celebrations in the salsa clubs, as well as at a small Baptist congregation. 17. See chapter 1 for a fuller discussion of formulations of loss and gains of migration. 18. Francis Cody (2013, 101–33) has a useful overview on Freire’s approach in a chapter on a literacy movement’s primers in Tamil Nadu. For other reviews, see Foley (2005), Gottlieb and La Belle (1990), and O’Cadiz and Torres (1994). 19. There is an instructive note in Cristina’s memoir. She notes in the early organization of La Escuelita one teacher had thought it necessary to teach values “because it was sad to see their rudeness [grosería] and the lack of respect for adults, our children are learning the insolence of Israeli children, this is not the model of politeness [educación] that is imparted to children in Latin America.” However, Cristina notes they decided at the time that it should be parents who instill values, and not La Escuelita. 20. The desire to speak a Hebrew-free Spanish was reinforced in staff meetings: when teachers would use a Hebrew form, the group would scramble to find the commensurate Spanish term. 21. The formal name, and its Hebrew version, all changed somewhat from year to year. Normally “drom amerikay” (South American) was the descriptor for the kind of folklore and culture, but in later years the term latinit (Latin) or me’amerika halatinit (from

Inculcating Citizenship | 109 Latin America) became more common. I often heard latini being used as the commensurate term for Latino. 22. Animador goes a bit further than master of ceremonies. For example, I was once asked to be un animador at a small children’s birthday party, meaning to run activities for the children. 23. I assume that Spain is included due to the colonial past, which is remembered as creating a common racial lineage between Spain and Hispanophone Latin America. 24. On the delivery of this official public culture, see for example Liebman and DonYehiya (1983), Shamgar-Handelman and Handelman (1991), Handelman and ShamgarHandelman (1993), Zerubavel (1995), Katriel (1991, 1997), and Handelman (2004). 25. For some historical outlines of Israeli Scouts as one of many youth movements, see Alon (1989), Ben-Yehuda (1995, 83–126), Degani (2014), and E. Cohen (2015). See also discussion of youth movements in the introduction. 26. Anat Tzigelman, “Whoever leads scouts from special education, their social standing rises” [in Hebrew], Haaretz, April 21, 2003, http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/pages/ShArtPE .jhtml?itemNo=286151; Moran Zelikovitsch, “The Scouts—the largest youth movement in Israel” [in Hebrew], November 6, 2005, http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3164670,00 .html. 27. Mizrahi is literally “Oriental,” but refers to the population that is considered to have descended from Jewish immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa. Ashkenazi is used to refer to the population that is considered to have descended from Europeans. Many of the poorest and most racialized populations of Israeli Jews are Mizrahim, and a history of discrimination has created constant tensions. 28. As I point out in chapter 1, Latinos tended to see the wealthy Ashkenazi employer class as the paradigmatic Israeli. 29. Moran Zelikovitsch, “Siempre listo” [in Hebrew], Ha’Ir, November 6, 2003, pp. 16–17. 30. As one Israeli explained to me, the adjectival form of lehar’il, mur’al, is used to describe someone who completely buys into the military’s program. Apparently youth movements once used the expression “lehiyot saruf al hatnu’a” (to be burned on the movement) for a similar disposition; see Katriel (1987, 457). 31. This debate is even alive in studies of early Jewish immigration to Israel, e.g., regarding whether it was racist settlement policy that marred the integration of Middle East and North African Jewish immigrants in the 1950s. For example Hacohen (2003, esp. chap. 8) gives an apologetic treatment of these debates, while Shohat (1988) and Chetrit (2010) give a much needed critical perspective. Shuval and Leshem (1998) provide a useful critical overview of the debates and its academic aspects. 32. On gibush, see Katriel and Nesher (1986) and Katriel (1988). 33. The Israeli Scouts often designed activities that sought to make youth think about a problem of ethical values or organization through an allegory. For example, Maya asked the group to play a game in pairs, one a farmer and the other a cow, and the farmer had to try to get the cow out of the room. After the farmer-counselors mostly tried to push or drag the cow-counselors, Maya pointed out to them that none had tried asking the cows to leave. Similarly, counselors had to find a way to convince children to come to the Scouts. 34. On tsfonim as a term for the Israeli middle class, see Birenbaum-Carmeli (2000). 35. See chapter 6, footnote 12, for a description of register differences.

110  |  Latinos in Israel 36. See chapter 6 on the term cultural exile (haglaya tarbutit). 37. According to the 2005 Resolution, every noncitizen child applicant had to prepare a file to be reviewed by a special office set up in the Ministry of Interior (see Paz 2016). Although most of the children at Eitan did not qualify under the 2005 Resolution, the Ministry wanted every noncitizen child to submit a file, probably to gauge numbers, which would then inform any further government action.

4

Chisme as Latino Public Life La Alcachofa and Marginal Public Voices

A

few months after finishing fieldwork in 2006, I was internet-chatting with Andrea, a Colombian friend in Israel. I asked how the highly anticipated wedding of two of her close friends had gone. Andrea, who had been a maid of honor and had worked closely with the group preparing the grand event, exclaimed in Spanish that the wedding had been “divine,” “truly beautiful,” and then concluded with pleasure, “we worked very hard, but all the chismosos [gossips] left happy. They didn’t criticize us too much.” I laughed and asked innocently, “which chismosos?” “Oh yeah, which chismosos????,” she answered sarcastically, “Colombians????? What a lie!!!!” Andrea thus invoked a cultural stereotype widespread among Latinos in Israel that they love to gossip. On another occasion, again chatting with Andrea, this time about the big Latino New Year’s Eve bash in Eilat, a resort town in southern Israel, I complained that she had not told me any good chismes (gossip).1 She answered by recounting a story about a woman who attacked her ex-boyfriend and his new girlfriend in the middle of the party, with more than eighty people looking on. The story of the jealous attack became the big news of the party—what everyone was talking about. Both the successful wedding and the New Year’s Eve fight were Latino news: these stories made the rounds along alternative kinds of circuits, and through different kinds of interactional practices, than the mainstream news of Israel. Such news was not of the kind to make the Israeli news (of course not!), and thus Latinos themselves label their news chisme. This chapter deals with the contrasts in how news disseminates, for example, the difference between Latino chisme and Israeli news. It also deals with with Latinos’ reflexivity about themselves as news-makers.2 The chisme label tended to frame any news coming from Latino communicative circuits, suggesting Latinos’ reflexivity about their inability to produce the authoritative voice of citizens in the public sphere, one who can inhabit a rational-critical voice, and one who makes demands on officials and who criticizes the actions of the state’s representatives. Chisme as a practice for disseminating Latino news is a contrast—and therefore an implicit response—to these more authoritative voices of the public sphere (see Jackson 2008; Manning 2012).3 Further, this contrast is highly gendered: chisme and being chismoso is associated with feminine behavior, while participating as

112  |  Latinos in Israel a citizen in the Israeli public sphere is contrastively more masculine.4 Finally, these contrasts are processual: as a story is recounted again and again in distinct events of interaction, across distinct channels of communication, and by different types of people, it comes to take on the (indexical) baggage of the participants who recounted it and of the sites where it was recounted. Examining the life of a chisme—or a news item, for that matter—thus throws into relief, as Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban (1996b) pointed out more generally, a whole host of issues about how a story comes to be judged and actively labeled—for example with terms like “gossip” or “news.”5 The topic of chisme has come up among scholars of Latin American transnationalism, who have pointed out how chisme is as an important vehicle for policing moral boundaries (e.g., Skolnik, Lazo De La Vega, and Steigenga 2012; Smith 2006, 63–66). Some aspects of this policing of behavior are found in the examples of this chapter. Yet generally such approaches ignore the contrast to more authoritative genres of news. It is important to emphasize that there is nothing inherently small about gossip, nor about the people who come to see themselves as gossips.6 Chisme too can be a genre of publicness. At the same time, the intimacy that surrounds chisme carves out a distinctly Latino public voice, juxtaposed and related to the more distanced impersonality of mainstream Israeli news.7 By calling themselves chismosos, Latinos were participating in or internalizing their own marginalization by doubting their ability—or more precisely the ability of other Latinos—to speak in authoritative ways. As I discuss in chapters 3 and 6, they required intermediaries to help them access the channels for authoritative public discourse. They could and did watch or read news in Hebrew or hear about it to some extent, but they had very limited opportunities to help produce it.8 Some of the Latino pioneer generation’s sense of marginality no doubt is due to their limited competence in the Hebrew language, a limitation that is even more acute in the formal registers used in the news media. Even Latino youth, who were fluent in colloquial registers of Hebrew, could find these formal registers intimidating. But competence in standard registers is only one aspect of a much broader boundary that kept noncitizen Latinos from full participation in Israeli public life. Even as Latinos seemed to accept the terms of their marginalization by calling themselves chismosos, chisme—and the chismoso voice—was a vital part of Latino public life in Israel. Latinos recognized themselves publicly through chisme, and especially chisme that was generated by a group that frequented places like the soccer field (la cancha) and resorts like Eilat. As I will describe, chisme was even transformed into a printed small-scale community news format, called La Alcachofa (“the artichoke,” see below). The chismoso voice became a Latino response to the more authoritative forms of the Israeli public sphere by becoming news about “us”—what we Latinos are saying about ourselves. The

Chisme as Latino Public Life  |  113 interactional practices of telling chisme are vital to the formation of Latino communicative circuits, and would even become a means for addressing Latinos as a collective. This chapter begins by describing some of the discursive aspects and interactional practices of telling chisme, as well as an illuminating contrast made in Latino usage between the terms chisme (originating from Latino circuits) versus rumor (originating from outside Latino circuits). I then consider a short-lived weekly publication that appeared from 2000 to 2001, whose popularity stemmed from its gossip column, La Alcachofa, and how the magazine crystallized news from la cancha. Finally, the chapter ends by describing an event at la cancha which either involved the pronouncements of a citizen struggling for rights or was just pure chisme.

“Escuché un chisme que . . .” Most theories of national publics and public spheres take formal news, current affairs, and other genres of “rational-critical” debate as the quintessential form for citizens’ mass public life. Gossip is not viewed as possessing the right kinds of formal characteristics to produce a universal, impersonal address.9 Even celebrity gossip is not generally considered to be the right kind of publicness for civic participation, and so of course news about a jealous attack at a resort or a big wedding among a small group of unauthorized immigrants would never count as interesting to deliberating citizens, right?10 Yet it is vital to ask how a type of news like chisme contrasts with citizens’ public sphere discussions, and to see the contrastive relation that forms between them. Otherwise we risk privileging as natural certain liberal forms of discourse that have been cast as universal (Cody 2015), often by bourgeois elites seeking to establish a hegemonic grip in contemporary polities. Ironically, even theories critical of bourgeois publicness reproduce some of the political claims to universality by maintaining a strict liberal definition of what is paradigmatic about the public sphere. In a further irony, Latinos in Israel also maintained some of these liberal assumptions when they describe themselves as chismosos. How then is it possible to analyze the kind of collective that forms around gossip? In one sense, chisme as a term indicates what everyone is talking about. When everyone disseminates a story, no one person or party can easily be made responsible for it. It is a “voice from nowhere,” to adapt a term from Susan Gal and Katherine Woolard (Gal 2012, 29–30; Gal and Woolard 2001a). The group that disseminates the story becomes collectively responsible. The dissemination of the story then becomes a part of creating the simultaneity of publicness—of groups large and small recognizing themselves in public. This relation between group and public dissemination is at the basis of discussions of imagined communities (B. R. O. Anderson 1991) and public spheres (Habermas 1989), or social

114  |  Latinos in Israel imaginaries more generally (Taylor 2002). Such dissemination, that is, is central to the public life of citizens, and to defining how citizens speak as part of constituting collective interests. However, there is a central tension when the form of collective dissemination is chisme. On the one hand, as the example of La Alcachofa column will show, the chismoso voice could be used for disseminating community news, and even for addressing issues of collective concern. On the other hand, Latinos’ practices for communicating chisme produced a reflexivity about their marginal position in Israeli public worlds, and would undermine the possibility that a more influential voice might arise. The pragmatic devices Latinos used in telling chisme, often marking information as uncertain, gave rise to a reflexivity about the limited processes of textual circulation, and thus to a limited publicness that forms as a result (cf. Warner 2002b, 62–68).11 It is worthwhile to examine this tension to show why it was so difficult for a voice claiming Israeli citizenship to arise from the sites where chisme was generated. There are four important discursive aspects to the reflexivity produced through the dissemination of chisme. The first discursive aspect is the role played by descriptors like “gossip” and “rumor,” and their Spanish parallels chisme and rumor, as well as how they are deployed in social contests. Such descriptors have a discursive function generally called “evidentiality” by linguists (more specifically, these are quotatives).12 That is, these terms indexically evoke, without stating it explicitly, an earlier event where the story was recounted and the present speaker was among the addressees (whether there actually was such an event is a separate issue). Further, that evoked prior event of interaction is understood to provide a warrant, or evidence, for the present recounting. This form of warrant indexes uncertainty: where a story is described with terms like “gossip” or “rumor,” one major implication is that the information conveyed is held as less than authoritative (Kockelman 2004).13 Now, in many contexts, it is not even necessary for terms like “gossip” or “rumor” to be used. It is enough for the story to be framed as such, for instance, by saying “I heard that . . . .” In other cases, the speaker will recount the story or information without any particular framing, but the addressee might think or state “oh, that’s just gossip.” In all societies, constant contests take place to establish what is authoritative knowledge and what could be put down as only gossip or rumor (among other possible descriptors). These contests lead to protracted processes of bolstering the authority of certain types of institutions, or types of speakers, as well as of undermining the authority of others. Calling some story or information “gossip” or “rumor” is one way to both claim authority and undermine the authority of others. A second important discursive aspect is how other events of interaction are evoked. Even asking what such descriptors mean shows the connection between morality, authority, source, and communicative circuits. When I asked

Chisme as Latino Public Life  |  115 one Colombian about the difference between chisme and (Spanish) rumor, he explained to me that rumor is like Hebrew shmu’a, it “passes from ear to ear” and could be real. Chismes, like Hebrew rexilut, on the other hand “pass from mouth to mouth,” and because the mouth is not easily controlled, chismes “get bigger and change.” These terms then are ways of talking about the kinds of interactions that give form to particular kinds of communicative circuits. The distinction here is presented with a different notion of agency: whereas (Spanish) rumor gives a sense of the same information passing without any effort from any one person, chisme involves the agency of people’s uncontrollable mouths. (Below I return to this distinction in use between rumor and chisme, to show a more complex practice.) Moreover, the typical use of both rumor and chisme in context suggests to participants further “chains of discourse relations,” to earlier and later moments in which the information was or will be relayed—“shadow conversations” as Judith Irvine (1996) famously called them. The repeated invocation of shadow conversations comes to project a group of speakers joined together by communicative circuits that emerge with, and are maintained by, the practice of sharing gossip and rumor. These circuits do not necessarily exist all at once, nor do they reproduce themselves perfectly. They only exist as long as the practices stabilize to some degree, so that the spatial and temporal aspects of participation become clear to the group. For Latinos in Israel, chisme was recognizable and drew them together. A third discursive aspect involves the footing established by using framings of chisme and rumor, and how such footings motivate reflexivity about groupness. Erving Goffman’s (1979) distinctions about footing and participant roles are again useful to express this relation.14 Goffman broke down the category of speaker to describe how a given utterance can have differences in who formulates the words (the author), who actually expresses them (the animator), and whose interests are at stake (principal). These distinctions are heuristic and not absolute, and as Irvine (1996) points out, they are ultimately indeterminate. When news—of any scale—seemingly becomes repeated by everyone, it can lose the features that locate it to one telling, to one time and place with situated actors. Under the right conditions, the party for which it has stakes becomes the collective as a whole: the principal of the utterance can become the collective. Each retelling only involves (it can seem) its reanimation, perhaps with different perspectives in authorship and animation. For example, when Andrea told me the chisme about the wedding and the New Year’s Eve fight, she positioned herself as simply telling me what everyone else was talking about. Certain chisme could likewise seem to Latinos to be news that everyone was discussing, and thus the telling of chisme could be perceived as a public voice. A final discursive aspect links the interactional practice of communicating chisme to the gendering of Latinos as a group. Chisme was considered a feminine

116  |  Latinos in Israel way of interacting for Latinos, something Besnier (esp. 2009, 14, 197n11) notes is common across many societies. For example, among Latinos, the figure of the vieja chismosa (“gossipy old woman”) was widespread. In one of the plays put on by La Escuelita for its annual festival (see chap. 3), a “typical” dysfunctional household was depicted with a soccer-mad husband and an unhappy, ignored wife. The chorus’s role was played as two viejas chismosas, who were male actors dressed as old women. The female gendering of chisme came up in other ways as well: one Colombian told me that to his mind, men were bigger gossips than women. By saying this, he meant to display his contrasting position to the prevailing views. With these four discursive aspects in mind, I will go through some ethnographic examples of Latinos’ use of the descriptor chisme. Javier, a longtime resident in Israel from Colombia, had the habit of phoning me to check on things he had heard. To do so, he often framed the claims as chisme. On one of many such occasions, La Escuelita, an after-school Spanish-language program with which I volunteered, was organizing a tour, and he phoned and said to me: Escuché un chisme que hay un paseo. I heard a chisme that there’s a tour.

Interactionally, he was addressing me as an authority because of my association with La Escuelita. I was someone who could vouch for the validity of the story. Once it was confirmed, he could then go on to ask me the details of the tour. Note that in this example, the point in calling the information chisme—as opposed to telling me with whom he spoke—is that he heard it from a source that could have included any number of intermediate sources, or shadow conversations, prior to reaching his ears. That is, by using the frame escuché un chisme, he in fact invokes a group of speakers who (for him) were disseminating the story. Because of stereotypes about Latinos getting information wrong, or exaggerating or even intentionally distorting it, he also took the knowledge as uncertain, at least until he talked to me. The next example is taken from a recording of a staff meeting in La Escuelita, during which the teachers met with a pedagogical advisor, Miguel. We were talking about one of the young pupils, Simón, who was clearly not advancing at school, having been in the first grade three straight years already. At one point, Miguel asked what the age of the child was, and Diego Manuel, the director of La Escuelita, answered that there was uncertainty because his mother said that he was six but the teachers suspected that Simón was actually seven. In a long discussion, teachers debated with Miguel what the possible problems were with Simón, whether they were behavioral or possibly organic, and some of the teachers spoke about the mother as also having difficulties, especially in her verbal

Chisme as Latino Public Life  |  117 communication. Later in the discussion, Miguel repeated the boy’s age as seven without hedging, and Diego Manuel interrupted him to say: Digamos que tiene seis, porque lo otro es un chisme que estamos sacando nosotros. Let’s say that he’s six, because the other is a chisme which we are starting.

Diego Manuel calls the statement that the child is seven a chisme because the group gathered at the meeting was the source of the information, and he cast doubt on its authority in the matter. No doubt he also used the term because, as a group, the teachers had just bad-mouthed Simón’s mother, implying that she was lying. His usage hearkens back to the earlier mention of Simón’s age, that is, the moment in which the chisme was generated. By saying “a chisme which we are starting,” Diego Manuel also projects future shadow conversations. Latinos often reflected on the proper framing of stories that were being disseminated as chisme. For example, Diego Manuel explained once that he no longer told chismes to one of the other teachers because she would repeat the story and add “Diego Manuel told me.” That is, the teacher was including the path of the information in her chisme-telling, and thus giving Diego Manuel a reputation as a chismoso. A chismoso who names names is the worst kind. “Se cuenta el milagro pero no el santo” (recount the miracle but not the saint) is one saying used in Colombia to provide counsel on the pragmatics of chisme-telling.15 On the other hand, disseminating uncertain information without the appropriate frame was also frowned upon. On one occasion, Melisa, a well-connected Colombian, told me that she was upset with some of her sources of information. She explained: whenever she told a story that she had heard secondhand, she made sure to frame it with “el chisme dice” (the chisme says). She was irritated that some people were simply repeating stories without such a frame, and thus innocent names were being smeared. I could multiply examples of uses of chisme, but there is an instructive contrast in Latinos’ use of the (Spanish) descriptor rumor. While chisme tended to frame stories or information as originating from within the group of Latinos, rumor tended to frame them as having originated from outside of Latino communicative circuits, and, by default and assumption, from Israelis. For example, a Colombian mother asked me about an article that had appeared one day in an Israeli newspaper regarding possible criteria for granting legal status to children of unauthorized immigrants. Since I was involved with one of the NGOs that advocated on behalf of labor migrants, the mother explained to me, she wanted to ask me exactly what had been published, and would continue to do so because cuando algo sale en el diario, hay miles de rumores when something comes out in the newspaper, there’s thousands of rumors

118  |  Latinos in Israel Likewise, Andrea (mentioned at the outset of this chapter) constantly asked me about a rumor that the Israeli state might begin giving legal status to unauthorized immigrants who had lived ten years in the country. When on a second occasion I told her that I had heard nothing about this, she responded that she heard it from her employers, not from Latinos, and that the rumores were persisting. In other words, she considered it more reliable than a story heard from another Latino. The story’s origin outside of Latino circles, and the attested direct source (her employers), were the reason Andrea consistently used the term rumor to frame it, rather than chisme. Later, the originary source of the rumor was made clear to me: a report from a government commission on Israel’s immigration policy had come out recommending that this policy be adopted. These examples point to differences in how the descriptors chisme and rumor map out the social space of a marginalized immigrant group. When chisme is used, a group is projected that speaks about itself, a we-group. Rumor on the other hand maps onto stories or information whose source is outside the group, in this case when “they,” the Israelis, say things that interest “us,” or are about “us,” or might even be addressed to “us.” To be clear: my point is not that there was a conscious moment of separating out chisme from rumor, but rather that a preexisting distinction of in-group versus out-group source was remapped to Latino versus Israeli source. In both cases, the descriptors’ evidential function contributes to the invocation of a Latino communicative circuit. The picture I am painting here is not entirely different than that of imagined communities discussed by scholars of nationalism and the public sphere. Benedict Anderson in particular described how the practice of reading novels and newspapers could project a community organized around the national vernacular. According to him (1991, 22–36), the practices of reading such texts, as well as the figures and places recounted by them, help to produce a sense of temporal simultaneity, where participants understand themselves to be engaged in practices at the same time as countless others. Further, as Anderson suggested, the modern nationalist novel and newspaper contain devices to signal the simultaneity of the characters within the textual world and the reader: especially in the nationalist novel, “we” are reading about “us” (so to speak). For example, places from the readers’ world are found within the textual world, including the most intimate and familiar places, suggesting to readers to how they could recognize themselves in public. In contrast to this, Latinos in Israel rarely recognized themselves as a distinct group in any of the authoritative sites of Israeli publicness. Unlike Israeli Jews, they rarely saw their particular collective perspective in Israeli public culture. Latinos did not see themselves in the television or printed news, for instance, except in reports about foreign workers, or during the campaign for citizenship. These were cases where they were represented as outside of or only

Chisme as Latino Public Life  |  119 problematically within the nation. Further, Latinos did not see any representation of the marginal places they inhabited in public, like la cancha. In some ways, Latinos did identify with the hegemonic forms of the Israeli nation in mass mediated communication; even so, they never quite got over their own ambivalent position as foreign workers. In contrast to Israeli forms of publicness, the practices for telling chisme generated familiar Latino characters in familiar places. Of course, such interactional practices work at a much smaller scale than in the examples used by Anderson and other theorists of the public sphere. Yet the smaller scale is a sign of Latinos’ response to their exclusion just as much as a fact of their lesser numbers and marginalization. Chisme was certainly not understood by them to be an alternative to the public sphere. Nevertheless, for a short period they did see chisme transformed into a gossip column in a weekly magazine. Considering this weekly, and the perspective it took, explains further how chisme became a form of Latino public voice.

Alcachofas: Printed Community Gossip A printed Latino magazine began appearing in April 2000 on a weekly basis for a six-month period, and then gradually petered out over the next year and a half. The magazine, called Latinos de Hoy (Latinos of Today), stopped being produced because its chief editor was arrested in 2001 and was eventually deported. Latinos de Hoy crystallized the perspective of a subgroup of Latinos whom I dub “cancha-goers” because they participated in the weekend soccer-field gatherings on a regular basis. Here, I will discuss how the evidential framing of chisme was a central device in transposing the interpersonal genre of chisme to a printed gossip column in the broadcast mode, and thus made more concrete a sense Latinos have of themselves as chismosos. Further, as I will discuss, the voice of the chismoso as framed and constituted by the column produced, for a time, a very different type of public voice than that normally observed in studies of largescale public spheres.

Perspective from la Cancha (The Soccer Field) Latinos de Hoy appeared before the advent of the Immigration Police in 2002, which started a wave of deportations and flight, as well as a dispersal of Latinos to Tel Aviv suburbs (see the introduction). The magazine’s readership, distribution, advertising, and local coverage centered on an important Latino weekend institution, la cancha. La cancha comprised the most public space that Latinos could inhabit, where they could perceive themselves as a group gathered in public (Kaviraj 1997, 94–96). Like other public spaces that the Latinos used, la cancha took place at a site usually attended only by Israeli working classes and the working poor.16 It was the perspective of the cancha-goer that was presented in the

120  |  Latinos in Israel magazine, and to understand this transposition, it is necessary to consider briefly the happenings at la cancha. In 2000, la cancha was where many secular Latinos used to, and to some extent still did in 2017, gather on Saturdays in a festival of food, soccer, and chatter. During my fieldwork, there were two smaller canchas where Latinos got together, one on Fridays after work and another one, significantly larger, on Saturday afternoons. I attended both as often as I could, as these were still ritual centers of secular life. Ostensibly, the reason for meeting on a field was for the men, and sometimes also the women, to play soccer, formerly in well-organized leagues (campeonatos). Since many cancha-goers spent Friday nights dancing at a salsa club until past sunrise, activities did not usually start on Saturdays until midafternoon.17 While people waited for the game to begin, they sat in groups and chatted. Often enough there were louder shouts and playful insults as the assembled tried to embarrass each other: who went missing from the salsa, who danced with whom, who drank too much, who left without paying, who slept with whom. All these were typical topics of the playful teasing and sometimes angry insults among cancha-goers. This banter was not only found at la cancha. Wherever I found myself with those that frequented la cancha, or one of the salsa clubs, the playful teasing was a constant feature, and often turned into competitive verbal play. La cancha was not just about soccer and gossip. Above all the banter blared the sound of the latest salsa, merengue, and cumbia from souped-up car stereos or large boom boxes. Some people set up barbecues, either for themselves or to sell hot food. Newcomers to Israel, or their contacts, came to ask around about work. La cancha could also be a site for the making or unmaking of conjugal relations, as well as for other types of social dramas. Indeed, throughout the pages of Latinos de Hoy were reports of large fights that broke out, and more than one editorial mentioned the need for Latinos to comport themselves with greater dignity in public, where Jewish Israelis see them. At some point, a soccer game did begin, and afterwards the stalwarts settled in for an evening of eating, drinking, and perhaps some more dancing, all of which drove the chatter. Such cancha-life as I witnessed, by all reports, was nothing compared to what went on before the Immigration Police came into existence in 2002, causing Latinos to disperse.18 Latinos of many backgrounds described to me the festival atmosphere of la cancha that went on before 2002, when several hundred would arrive to enjoy their day off.19 Dozens of booths and tents were set up to sell food, alcohol, and music CDs, many of which advertised in the pages of Latinos de Hoy. Major holidays were celebrated there, such as Mothers’ Day, Fathers’ Day, and national independence days. Fund-raisers were held to help out Latinos in distress. Most important perhaps were the soccer leagues, with ten teams or more squaring off on a regular basis. Apart from this Colombian-dominated cancha, I

Chisme as Latino Public Life  |  121 also heard described two others where the Ecuadorians and Bolivians were more prominent, having their own soccer leagues, food stands, and music. In other words, as a central meeting place for interlocking networks of friends and kin, and where important ceremonies were held, la cancha was one of the institutions where chismes were engendered as well as propagated among wider communicative circuits.

Latinos de Hoy In the midst of these weekly events arrived Latinos de Hoy, and by all accounts it had a widespread appeal and impact, achieving notoriety even among those who were not regular cancha-goers.20 In its pages, cancha-goers saw themselves represented in photos, stories, and especially through the alcachofas, the infamous print form of chisme. Furthermore, la cancha itself became more than just the congregating ground for reporting on and engaging in the activities found in alcachofas; it was also the principal time for reading the column. In this way, during the six or so months it appeared regularly, cancha-goers came to comprise much of the magazine’s reading public on a weekly basis.21 Ostensibly, Latinos de Hoy was supposed to provide news from Latin America and Israel. It was started by Andrea along with her then-husband Cecilio, who had been a journalist at a newspaper in Armenia, Colombia, called La Crónica del Quindío. According to Andrea, Latinos de Hoy was published as a not-for-profit service for Latinos to receive news in Spanish about the country in which they lived and the ones from which they came. The first editorial explained that the magazine was supposed to help “keep us informed about the daily events which are making the news in our countries of origin” (Editorial, No. 1, April 1, 2000). Andrea added that for the editors the paper also produced a sense of intellectual satisfaction, which they did not receive from their day jobs cleaning houses. According to Andrea’s description, they would work on the magazine after they returned from work each evening, and sometimes continue into the wee hours of the morning to make sure they met deadlines. Clearly, they also received no small dose of social power by controlling its contents. The magazine combined materials written by the editors with content lifted from elsewhere. Much of its thirty-odd pages were copied straight from the internet or from published sources. This included weekly news about Latin America, as well as some news from Israel, a section on Jewish customs, a section on health and beauty, a humor page, and occasionally a recipe or something else of interest. On the other hand, certain sections were penned by the editors: the editorial, the section about the Latinos at la cancha, the gossip column, and the occasional interview with a prominent local figure, like a Latin American priest or ambassador. Besides the written copy, there was also a social page, where Latinos could pay to publish a message and photo about a birthday or other special occasion.

122  |  Latinos in Israel No section, though, was as prominent as the one entitled “La Cancha,” which often included pages of photos and news about celebrations or the soccer league. The content offered by this section and the magazine as a whole was summarized by the slogan of the newspaper: Para que se entere de lo nuestro (To let you know about ours). Lo nuestro (ours) here indicates the “we” of Latino news. The focus on things Latino, and indeed the perspective from la cancha, was partly constituted by photos taken by Cecilio, who apparently had some training as a photographer. The photos took the position of someone who wanders around la cancha, seeing friends (figure 4.1), watching the soccer game (figure 4.2), or watching the celebrations of events like Mothers’ Day. One description helps to explain the perspective of the cancha-goer which the magazine sought to capture (in Spanish): La Cancha “The Land for Everyone” La Cancha, traditional meeting site of Colombians and Latin Americans, has on its calendar for this 2000 various activities for socializing and brotherhood. During this month of May, there’ll be celebrated the traditional Mothers’ Day, dances, contests, sports, among other activities being held.22

La cancha was supposedly open to everyone to come and enjoy, a condition that William Mazzarella (2013, 29–75) terms the “open edge of mass publicity.” This “Land for Everyone” contrasts with many other public places in Israel where Latinos (and other unauthorized immigrants) were not welcome. This place hosted the events where Latinos could see their own traditions, including several that are still kept alive at La Escuelita (see chap. 3). Although the gossip column was only half a page long, everyone I interviewed agreed that it was the most popular section and had the greatest impact. It was entitled La Alcachofa, which literally means “The Artichoke,” but in Colombia also has a colloquial meaning of someone who speaks vulgarly. (According to Andrea, the column received its name when a friend overheard the editors planning it, and remarked that it was going to be an alcachofa.) Etymologically, the intended sense seems to come from a second widespread meaning of alcachofa: a sprinkler or showerhead. Like such equipment, the chismoso is someone who will regar el chisme (spray the chisme) everywhere. Alcachofa became the name of such printed chismes for cancha-goers. I asked Andrea if there was a model for this gossip column. She answered that in Colombia there are gossip columns, but nothing quite like this one, where the local farándula (celebrities) are its subjects. She felt that they were pioneers in this kind of reportage. Part of the difference she remembers no doubt has to do with the formal devices with which the chisme is voiced. Anyone still in Israel who remembers the magazine affirmed that it was very chismoso, sometimes stating this with intense disgust. Many admitted that the

Chisme as Latino Public Life  |  123

Figure 4.1 “La Cancha” from Latinos de Hoy, No. 14, July 15, 2000. The caption reads, “Fernando el ‘Pitillo’ [the straw] in the company of his girlfriend Ribi, while he is savoring a tasty Colombian platter. After the meetings [of soccer] the afternoon becomes calm and a great atmosphere is breathed among the Latinos.” Reproduced with the permission of Editors of Latinos de Hoy.

only reason they bought the magazine was to read the chismes, something to which Andrea herself attested. Perhaps this is an exaggeration, but it is clear that La Alcachofa was what drove sales, which sometimes topped 2000 copies. In the top left photo and caption of figure 4.2, the editors captured the sense that Latinos were reading about themselves in public at la cancha: the photo shows three women reading the magazine, with the page turned to La Alcachofa (the familiar clip art photo, seen in figure 4.3, is visible). One of the most important aspects of the gossip column was that its content was meant to be determined by readers, who supposedly phoned in the good stories anonymously. The editors sought to position themselves as animators simply repeating the chisme that everyone was talking about. In our interview, Andrea

124  |  Latinos in Israel

Figure 4.2 Full-color page on La Cancha, from Latinos de Hoy, No. 12 July 1, 2000. The caption reads: “In the above image it is demonstrated that La Alcachofa is one of the most read pages of our magazine. In the photo next to it we appreciate the Israeli police officers who didn’t want to miss the game between Romania and Colombia.” (Romania and Colombia here are two team names.) Reproduced with the permission of Editors of Latinos de Hoy.

Chisme as Latino Public Life  |  125

Figure 4.3 Typical Alcachofa column, from Latinos de Hoy, No. 24 October 14, 2000. Reproduced with the permission of Editors of Latinos de Hoy.

remembered the eagerness to determine next week’s content: “they almost always called, or always towards the weekend. Saturday, when La Alcachofa was read at la cancha, people started to come up with little pieces of paper. And they’d pass them to us. Like, ‘look, for next week’s La Alcachofa.’” The editors’ role is more complicated than this description. However, it is worth considering what kinds of formal devices were used to establish this positioning, and more generally the Latinos’ chismoso voice. The anonymous source was represented both graphically on the page as well as discursively at the beginning of nearly every alcachofa. Graphically, almost every column had a clip-art picture of a woman with several telephones in her hands, and a bemused grin on her face (see figure 4.3). The alcachofa graphic thus incorporated both the feminine gendering of chisme as well as the image of the stories’ circulation in ways that diffused their authorship and responsibility. In addition to this image, an evidential frame like se dice (it’s said) was used at the beginning of almost every alcachofa to key the reader to the genre of chisme.23 In fact, this frame was the most ubiquitous device for signaling the genre: of 217 stories in the 31 issues, 196 began with such a frame. Prominently,

126  |  Latinos in Israel verbs of speaking (e.g., decir, to say), perception (e.g., escuchar, to hear), propositional attitude (e.g., saber, to know) and inference (e.g., parecer, to seem) were used. These frames generally made it possible to avoid referring to a particular individual as the source. Other devices used to emphasize the anonymous origins of the alcachofa included the nonreferential use of por ahí (around there or somewhere) and three common particles, tal or al parecer (it seems), será (could it be), and dizque (it’s said). These devices helped to signal that alcachofas were anonymous chismes, for which no one person could be held responsible. Another device that was supposed to contribute to the relative anonymity associated with la cancha was the use of nicknames or related, more complex collocations that were familiar to cancha-goers. Andrea stressed that real names were never used (although there were clear exceptions, discussed below). One example she gave was the moniker la Beverly Hills which was used for a cancha regular who would show up to la cancha in one of the cars of her employers, at a time when most Latinos had no way of buying a car. Such cancha-names both helped to signal the anonymity of alcachofas and also tied the reader to the in-group that could recognize it. That is, the use of this cancha-name also made the Latino perspective recognizable to the reader: while the person was ostensibly not referred to by name, she or he was still “famous” for those who frequented la cancha. If these discursive devices helped to produce a sense of anonymous public voice, others helped to produce in this printed form aspects of the typical cancha chisme-telling. Alcachofas contained a high degree of colloquialisms, idiomatic expressions (dichos), sayings (refranes), and the like. This combination of devices associated with the oral banter of sites like la cancha was forged into very efficient, short texts. It contrasted significantly with the standard Spanish register found in the copied materials used for other sections of Latinos de Hoy. Likewise, alcachofas were supposed to be funny and not constitute personal attack. The first two Alcachofa columns included the subtitle chismecitos (little chismes). These elements of the laughter and colloquialism of la cancha were represented in one alcachofa that was supposed to sound like a Chilean was writing it: No es que me gusta el chisme, lo que pasa es que me entretiene ja ja ja . . . cachay que sí. It’s not that I like gossip, it’s just that it amuses me ha ha ha . . . know whadda mean.

Here the amused reader giggling to him- or herself is represented, enjoying some good gossip, complete with the laughter. The Chilean colloquialism cachay (get or understand something) evokes the informal, intimate contexts in which ­gossip is supposed to flourish. Part of the thrill and humor was the fear about what might find its way into Alcachofa’s pages. As one person remembered it: “you were scared to appear

Chisme as Latino Public Life  |  127 there.” On the front cover of the third issue—at the same time as the subtitle “chismecitos” no longer appeared for the column—this fear was captured with the following headline: “La Alcachofa: La Página Terror de los Latinos” (La Alcachofa: The Latinos’ Page of Terror). The irony here is clear: given the widespread fear of bombing attacks in Tel Aviv, especially during the late nineties, as well as the public discussion of terror, La Alcachofa is facetiously compared to what explodes in the lives of Latino cancha-goers. La Alcachofa then was presented as a humorous take on local Latino news, and thus it hardly seems like a public voice that could be forged to comment on civic matters of common interest. Further, the editors of Latinos de Hoy sought to position themselves as simply disseminators (or animators) of what was already news among Latinos. If they were going to editorialize, they used the opening editor’s remarks at the front of the magazine. La Alcachofa was reserved for amusement. Or at least that’s how everyone remembered La Alcachofa, as pure chisme, including Andrea when I discussed the column with her. Yet here we see the responsive character of a public voice, where out of the humor of telling chisme could also emerge a different perspective. Once its popularity was established, a voice could emerge that unequivocally took up the collective public interests of Latinos. One example was public comportment, especially where Latinos would be under the scrutiny of Israelis, as in the scene pictured in figure 4.2, a photo from Latinos de Hoy of conscripted Israeli police officers watching the soccer game. In several of the editorials, Cecilio complained about rowdy behavior and fights at la cancha, and noted that Latinos had to preserve good conduct in public spaces. Certainly, given the precarious legal status of most Latinos, it is not surprising some were concerned about attracting attention from the police, or simply giving Latinos a poor reputation. On a couple of occasions, this concern made its way onto the page of La Alcachofa. This is the intended message to someone called Tamara in the following (as above, I preserve the original nonstandard spelling): Se rumora que ciertas niñas latinas viajan a los tour’s con algunos traguitos de más, y luego se dedican a “dar lora” en el autobús; y si están en algún lugar público se lucen; dejando en ridículo a sus compañeros y amigos . . . Compórtate Tamara!!! It’s rumored that certain Latina girls go on tours having a few too many drinks, and then they dedicate themselves to “make drama” on the bus; and if they are in a public place they put on a show; shaming their fellows and friends . . . Behave Tamara!!!

The alcachofa seems to begin like all others, using the various devices described above to compose what could be construed as a friendly barb. But then the voice of the chismecito changes into something else. At the phrase “shaming their fellows and friends,” but definitely with the final “Behave Tamara!!!,” the admonishment

128  |  Latinos in Israel becomes clear. The use of the explicit imperative form and addressing one of the targets by her first name and not her cancha-name convert the fun of the small chisme into a full-blown public reprimand. The disciplining effects of chisme seem to come into view with this example, as does how a public voice can help produce a sense of collective, public interest. If La Alcachofa as a column could be used to address issues of public, collective concern for Latinos, it also focused on the affairs of those considered to be famous local Latinos. This link between collective concern and the affairs of the local celebrities came up in an apology the editors felt forced to publish instead of the gossip, after offending one target with an alcachofa about her. The case involved a widely known figure, named Claudia, who was famous for selling raffle tickets house to house. The alcachofa accused her of gossiping more than selling tickets: Se dice que hay una rubia oxigenada y de lengua envenenada, habla que habla de los mijos y las mijas en lugar de dedicarse a sus rifas. It’s said that there’s a bleached blonde and of poisonous tongue, talks and talks about the buddies and the darlings instead of dedicating herself to her raffles.

Straying from the supposed policy of using only cancha-names, in the next issue, the apology mentions her full name, and is signed by Cecilio with his own full name. But Cecilio went beyond simply apologizing. He also laid out how the column should be enjoyed, and how targets should understand themselves as local Latino celebrities: No siendo este incidente motivo para no continuar con nuestra entretenida y muy leída página seguiremos escribiendo esta sección, con más sabor a rosa y esperando que aquellas personas que figuren en esta sección se sientan orgullosas. De este modo queremos seguirlos entreteniendo, siendo conscientes, que el chismecito a todos les agrada. Since this incident isn’t a reason to stop our entertaining and widely read page, we’ll keep writing this section, with even more taste for the famous and hoping that those people who are mentioned in this section will feel proud. In this way we want to keep entertaining you, being aware, that a little gossip pleases everyone.

When I asked Andrea what was meant by the phrase “más sabor a rosa,” she explained that it referred to chismes of the heart and about the famous, and here it meant “the famous Colombians that were around at that time.” The discussion of the famous people—famous at la cancha—is vital to understanding the public voice that could form around chisme. Latinos in Israel could not be famous in any large-scale mass mediated outlet in Israel. Their events and scandals would not be reported in Israeli news. However, they had a

Chisme as Latino Public Life  |  129 response. Always finding themselves outside of the centers of the Israeli public, they saw their fame through gossip. The gossip column was a tongue-in-cheek way of treating the information that passed for local Latino news. At the same time, the projected community is linked to a space and time that is not limited to Israel. Beyond the material about global or Latin American affairs that was copied from elsewhere, the pages of Latinos de Hoy that were dedicated to la cancha through photos, reports about soccer, or the alcachofas brought the local sense of community into stark relief. The complex, weekly festival of la cancha, like the salsa night that preceded it, were understood to be pastimes brought from Latin America. The practices of la cancha thus inserted a Latin American spatial and temporal frame within the public space of Israel. The grassy fields where la cancha took place were not the prominent public spaces of Israel—they were not parliament nor courts, for example, nor even where protest demonstrations were held. La Alcachofa pointed to the reflexivity of Latinos’ marginality, which was signaled through the discursive devices used in this genre. La Alchachofa could comment explicitly on moral behavior, but in ways that maintained generic devices. In short, even a gossip column could become a forum for speaking in public about collective interests.

The Chismoso Voice of Latinos Strikes Again La Alcachofa was remembered by all longtime Latino residents much more than the rest of Latinos de Hoy. I discovered its existence while helping one Colombian mother put together a file for her children’s application to gain Israeli citizenship (see chap. 6). Among the photos and report cards she had kept about her children was a copy of two of the last issues. Ironically, she had unintentionally archived Latinos de Hoy, with its reminder of la cancha’s vibrant past, among the papers that the state sought to prove continuous residence. It goes without saying that the magazine would not be considered proof of residence in Israel. Unlike her children’s photos and report cards, it could not be presented as part of applying for citizenship. Yet Latinos de Hoy captured her own relation to Israel, to a marginalized Latino Israel, which could perceive itself through the playful chismoso voice. Here is a contradiction: the chismoso voice was the one through which Latinos, especially adults, perceived their publicness in Israel, and yet it could not be recognized as part of Israeli publicness, and therefore it would never receive standing in bureaucratic procedures for granting residence and citizenship. As opposed to the Hebrew-speaking voice of childhood discussed in chapter 6, the chismoso voice that arose from la cancha was limited as a means for Latinos to make claims to citizenship. Yet at la cancha, there still remained the tension found in La Alcachofa’s pages between a voice of amusement and a voice of collective concern, where the call to citizen-like action could potentially arise.

130  |  Latinos in Israel The precarity of the Latinos’ circumstances in Israel especially lent itself to the genesis of chisme, or rather, to the constitution of stories that could not be easily verified by any authoritative source, and where the source itself was difficult to pin down. One evening in July 2005 at la cancha in Tel Aviv, after the soccer matches were over and people were well into drinking and eating, such a chisme began disseminating. Suddenly shouts were heard. A group came to me to explain that Dante’s wife had just called him, in tears, after hearing from her daughter that a Latina mother had just been arrested by the Immigration Police, and was going to be deported with her thirteen-year-old son the next day. They sought me out as the accessible volunteer of a labor migrant advocacy NGO, the Hotline for Migrant Workers. I began to make some phone calls to the Hotline’s administrators, who were skeptical and yet still considered contacting an Israeli journalist. Before we got to the point of contacting a journalist, however, the story was debunked. Until it was debunked, the story struck fear into a large group of assembled Latinos, who believed themselves immune from arrest. At the time, the Ministry of the Interior had placed a moratorium on deporting labor migrant parents, overwhelmingly mothers, while public deliberations took place about the possibility of citizenship for children who had been raised in Israel. It was not possible to deport someone so quickly, since every arrest and deportation order could be appealed. The thought that a mother could have been arrested and would be deported immediately with her son essentially contradicted everything that gave Latinos a sense of security. When the story broke at la cancha, it was the kind of news that made Latinos feel like a collective, both as the (Goffman) principal with collective stakes and also as a group where everyone was repeating the story. That these were collective stakes became immediately clear as we waited to hear back from the Hotline. One fellow, Jorge, quite drunk, started a particularly boisterous rant (in Spanish). He raised a call to arms which saw him publicly inhabiting the discourse of a citizen willing to defend himself from the encroachments of the state. “No one can touch a child!,” Jorge shouted to everyone and no one; “when they touch a child, they have problems with me!” He appealed to all assembled to join him to go somewhere and demand the release of mother and son. It was unclear where exactly he intended to go, and who “they” were, but we all worried that he meant the police station. His dismayed wife did all she could to calm and dissuade him, fearful that he would simply get himself arrested. In the meantime, I managed to get the phone number of the mother, Martina, who had supposedly been arrested. A phone call to her confirmed that she was fine (as she put it, worried no doubt about a hex, “don’t even say that, it’s the second time this week I’ve been called!”). When I reported that I had just spoken to Martina, the uproar began to subside.

Chisme as Latino Public Life  |  131 Soon after, it became clear how the story had been generated, quickly traveling Latino communicative circuits. The story originated when Martina’s thirteen-year-old son, Robert, played a prank on his girlfriend: Robert told his girlfriend that Martina had just been arrested and that he was leaving Israel. Robert’s prank immediately set off a path of communication that led to la cancha: Robert’s girlfriend phoned Dante’s daughter, who then told her mother, who then phoned Dante at la cancha, who then reported it to all assembled. As everyone prepared to leave, agitated but relieved, Javier (who is mentioned above, and had the custom of calling me to check on things he had heard) turned to me and said “Ves como son los chismes?” (See how chismes are?). In other words, the story went from being the talk of la cancha to simple chisme in a matter of hours. What had looked like a matter for the Israeli public sphere was reframed by the end of the evening as simply the voice of chisme. The episode also shows how crucial la cancha was as a place for disseminating Latino news. The story Robert told his girlfriend about his mother Martina’s supposed arrest set off a long series of conversations and phone calls—it was hot if still unconfirmed news for Latinos and even a couple of NGO personnel. If the story had been true, it might even have entered into the Israeli news cycle, to some degree, given that the Hotline advocate was considering contacting a journalist. At the same time, the episode shows the difficulty of using a place like la cancha to produce a citizen’s voice as part of the public sphere, as opposed to the voice of chisme. This is one lesson from the instructive contrast between Jorge’s drunken rant that sounded like that of a citizen demanding rights, and Javier’s sardonic comments at the end that took this event as a typical example of Latino chisme. The brief voice of the citizen that Jorge managed to produce was ultimately reframed by the larger sense that Latinos cannot be trusted. Latinos struggled with the sense they had of being chismosos, and yet the publicness of chisme could always become a means to help organize community news. La Alcachofa’s popularity derived from the ability of the editors to make local Latino news out of the voice of chisme. This possible transposition to a broadcast print medium was always just in the offing, even during the period of my fieldwork (2004–2007). One attempt to produce a community website for news was made while I was there. José, more than fifteen years in Israel, was one of the true Latino veterans and also played the crucial role of animador, or emcee, at Latino events. His teenage son, adept with technology, set up a website for him that was named after a group of friends, Los Independientes (The Independents), who would sometimes play percussion and dance together at gatherings. Los Independientes itself was a playful cancha-name: it is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the fact that each member of the group plays according to his own rhythm, rather than playing in unison. Not unlike the Latinos de Hoy a half decade before, José hoped that Los Independientes website would serve the community for news

132  |  Latinos in Israel and announcements. He also wanted to add a discussion forum, with restricted access. One of the first posts was written by José and Ignacio, a close friend, and it sounded like the type of story that might have made its way into an alcachofa previously. The story centered on Dante, whose wife was angry with him. According to the tale, Dante invited a couple of friends to his house in order to serenade her, but he was so drunk that he went inside, fell asleep, and left his friends outside waiting for him. While I visited José’s house, he and Ignacio spent two hours writing the story about Dante, enjoying ribald laughter together. Just like La Alcachofa previously, they even included an anonymous “source” called el trapito (the little cloth). The next day, while José and I were lunching with friends, the story about Dante came up again, and José explained that on Los Independientes website they would praise Dante for his talents, but that in the comments they were going to make fun of him. José stressed that it would be good-natured fun (para la recocha). I mentioned that it sounded to me like La Alcachofa, and José responded emphatically that it would be nothing like that. Later, another friend explained that La Alcachofa was always writing about who slept with whom. In response, José reiterated that his website would not do anything of the sort, but only do good-natured teasing—just as the editors of La Alcachofa claimed they were only animating chismecitos. José and his friends managed to update their website a few more times, but then it fell into disuse. However, the episode shows the close relation made between combining the chismoso voice of Latino news with more serious community news.

Conclusion When José denied the comparison to La Alcachofa, he in a sense acknowledged that the website Los Independientes already was facing some of the issues that surrounded Latinos de Hoy. The playful chismoso was a voice that enabled Latinos to recognize themselves in public. It brought intimacy to Latino publicness, distinguished from and yet responding to the more distant voice of official Israeli news. Such entangled forms of publicness also meant that the chisme voice was perceived as a feminine one, as opposed to the masculinity of the Israeli public sphere. Enjoying these chismes together, for example at la cancha, was understood to build community. Yet the humorous quality was always threatened by the fact that the printed form of chisme changes the interactional practices that produce communicative circuits. These changes enable someone to be held responsible. For example, despite Cecilio and Andrea’s claims that they were merely animators of amusing stories that were making the rounds, Cecilio was forced to make an apology to Claudia when an alcachofa offended her. Moreover, the example of the chisme about Martina at la cancha, as well as the publicness of chisme more generally, shows the problems of turning such a

Chisme as Latino Public Life  |  133 voice into a means to speak as a citizen. On the one hand, the chisme, and the circuits that form as it disseminates, could express Latino collective concerns. On the other hand, such publicness is inherently marginal, based on practices that betray a keen sense of distrust in the knowledge of Latinos. In more editorializing alcachofas, the editors of Latinos de Hoy did manage to make the chismoso voice into one that could deliver a public rebuke or a public apology. They thus addressed issues of collective interest, where Latinos as a group become the principals of the utterance (in Goffman’s terms). Yet when Jorge attempted to make his drunken rant into a call to arms for those at la cancha, the marginalization of Latinos was in full display. Eventually, the whole episode was reframed as typical Latino chisme, not to be trusted. In short, the transmission of chisme involves complex sociocultural calculations about morality, dissemination, and epistemic authority. The general distrust Latinos maintained for information or stories from other Latinos was related to the extent of the shadow conversations that could ensue. The communicative circuits formed through the practices of telling chisme did not stop at Latinos, as we will see in the next chapter. Latino distrust in other Latinos was exacerbated due to the Israeli police tactic of using informers—or sapos, as Latinos call them—to find and arrest undocumented migrants. The fear of sapos, and the accusations of who was a sapo, tied Latino communicative circuits to the state’s efforts to produce a public voice that addressed citizens and demanded their complicity in finding deportable subjects. I turn to this next.

Notes 1. Eilat is the Red Sea beach resort on the southernmost tip of Israel, and it was as far as most Latinos traveled when they had a break from work. To reach Eilat, it is necessary to travel overland for four hours through the Negev Desert, and thus it is considered a faraway paradise by those who frequent it. To make it more attractive, and to encourage population settlement there, the state exempts it from various taxes, including the 17 percent VAT. Thus, Latinos, like other foreign and domestic tourists, liked to shop in its many cavernous, airconditioned malls for luxury goods. 2. See the introduction for a discussion of linguistic reflexivity. 3. Here I am drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s arguments about how Rabelais’s oeuvre helped to create a new relation of person to body and afterworld at the end of the Middle Ages. According to Bakhtin (1981b, 167–242), Rabelais’s devices of using taboo aspects of the body as well as using laughter challenged the chronotopes of distance produced by earlier pieties. Likewise, chisme as an intimate public voice responds to the more distanced impersonality of the mainstream genres of Israeli news. 4. See Lukose (2005) for an important discussion of the varieties of masculinity and publicness. I do not mean to conflate these forms of masculinity in the Israeli case, but rather to discuss the relative feminization that occurs when Latinos describe themselves as chismosos.

134  |  Latinos in Israel 5. The host of issues revealed is what I take to be the meaning for the study of gossip of M. Silverstein and Urban’s seminal statement about the social processes that precipitate a text, “entextualization” as they term it: “Entextualization reveals an architecture of social relations, and becomes the basis for numerous metadiscursive projections, as the interactional backdrop of a given text is projected onto others, producing a generic image of fixed identities and social categories” (1996b, 14). 6. In other words, even by using the term “gossip” to describe certain practices, scholars often reproduce the misrecognition of their research subjects about how knowledge is evaluated, and smuggle in their own scholarly notions of what is and what is not authoritative knowledge, and where such knowledge is or is not produced. For this reason it is vital to keep in mind the contrast between (for example) chisme and Israeli news. It is not possible to understand one without the other: explaining why some populations would feel alienated from the official sites of news production is important to understanding their self-description as gossips. 7. For a fascinating account of similar processes of producing public opinion through gossip, and the ties to citizenship practices, see Lazar (2008, 61–90). 8. Up until the end of my fieldwork in 2007, Latinos had access to Spanish language alternatives for official kinds of news. A very few made a considerable effort to remain in contact with public discussion in their countries of origin (even, for example, voting in elections). Yet most found that their hold on what is going on in those other national spheres was tenuous at best. Through cable television, they had access to Spain’s TV5 on television, although several complained that the news coverage there was mostly of the sensational variety. Others read some news online, but generally these other sources did not help constitute them as informed citizens. By 2018 this had changed because of social media, especially Facebook. 9. For example, Michael Warner explicitly contrasts the impersonal address of stranger sociality for publics to the supposedly personal address that is involved in disseminating gossip (2002b, 58–59). Although there is great merit to this definition, the problem with such an analysis is that it ultimately takes Habermas’s theory of the impersonal forms of the public sphere to be the paradigmatic case. Habermas never actually does a formal analysis of the pragmatics of this impersonal voice, and Warner’s is only incipient. As a consequence, their style of analysis ultimately seeks to cut away the constant heteroglossic re-formations and voicing contrasts found in all discursive life. It does not do justice to the complex patterns of dissemination involved in the formation of communicative circuits (Boyer 2013, 136–43; Spitulnik 1996, 2002), which often involve recursive uses of public voices at smaller scales, while intimate voices can be used at larger scales. For some useful discussions that seek to reinvigorate the debate about how publics form, see Yeh (2012) and Cody (2015). 10. It may seem ludicrous for the reader to contemplate that the news made by a small group of domestic workers could be newsworthy for a large public sphere. However, the domestic affairs of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s household, and especially Sara Netanyahu’s abuse of domestic workers, were in the news for years when several of the workers sued. That is, the happenings of domestic workers can become news. 11. For my approach to “circulation,” see n. 39 in the introduction for what I call communicative circuits. 12. In more linguistic terminology, chisme and (Spanish) rumor, like their English counterparts, gossip and rumor, are lexicalizations of the metapragmatic function of

Chisme as Latino Public Life  |  135 quotative evidentiality; that is, they index a prior event of communication. Like similar grammaticized and framing evidentials in every speech community, their use in interaction has a tendency to project a group that is sharing the tale. For a more linguistic and linguistic anthropological account of these details, see Paz (2009). 13. Paul Kockelman, in formulating a general framework of the relation between evidentiality and epistemic modality (or status), describes how such first-order indexicality (source) implicates a second-order indexicality, a commitment to the validity of the conveyed information (esp. 2004, 143). See M. Silverstein (2003) for an explanation of indexical orders. 14. See also chapter 2 for a discussion of Goffman’s concept of footing. 15. I am grateful to Santiago Giraldo for telling me about this saying. 16. There are lots of example of how Latinos inhabit more marginal public spaces, from basement churches to the types of hotels in which they gathered for vacation. Maybe the best example comes from the Passover long weekend in 2005, when a large group of Latinos went camping together near Tiberias (in the eastern Galilee, next to the Sea of Galilee). The campground had two other large groups: one of “Arabs” and the other of “Russians.” From Latinos’ perspective, there were no “Israelis,” meaning middle-class Jewish Israelis. All three groups brought large sound systems and transformed their outing into a small-scale public performance by playing their music at full volume until late into the night. The Latinos joked that they had beat the Arabs and Russians by lasting the longest. 17. In Israel, the weekend for most people starts Friday afternoon, with the entry of Shabbat, and then goes until Saturday night. Many Latinos also work fewer hours on Friday. Sunday is the first day of the workweek. 18. From internal references in Latinos de Hoy, it seems that the roundups of unauthorized immigrants at la cancha predated the Immigration Police. Already in 2001, a year earlier, there are references to the progressive destruction of la cancha by police raids. 19. See chapter 1 for a discussion of the importance of this festival atmosphere for Latino interactional practices of alegría. 20. Although I did not do fieldwork during the time the magazine appeared, my friend and interlocutor Andrea, who had started the magazine with her husband, helped me get copies of all but one of the thirty-two published issues. She also described for me in long interviews how it was put together and helped me reconstruct many of the obscure references. 21. See Laurier and Philo (2007) on a similar phenomenon in early newspapers and English coffee houses. 22. There is much nonstandard writing throughout the sections scripted by the editors, and in particular las alcachofas. I have generally not made note of these in the English translation. 23. Evidential frames are a subclass of what M. Silverstein (1985b) calls “metapragmatic frames.”

5 El Sapo Speaks Police Informers and the Voice of the State

It was Good Friday in Tel Aviv, 2005. Diego Manuel and I were going salsa club

to salsa club, passing out flyers about the big annual Festival, the fund-raiser for La Escuelita.1 Saturday was the one day when most Latinos could rest, and Friday night salsa clubs were always popular, even though the Immigration Police had arrived more than once to round Latinos up for arrest and deportation. Why risk it? Generally the explanation among salsa-goers was that Latinos just couldn’t help themselves, they needed esa rumba—they needed that party. After a week of mostly working alone, cleaning houses or taking care of Israeli children and elderly, la Salsa was a place to meet, to revel in collective Latino effervescence. Plus many Latinos had a way to avoid deportation. Parents of children who grew up in Israel could not be deported, for example. At the time, Israeli politicians were considering granting some citizenship rights to a limited portion of these children and by extension, their parents (see chap. 6). The Ministry of Interior maintained a quiet, semiofficial policy of preventing the arrest and deportation of these families while the matter was being deliberated.2 Diego Manuel thought that on Good Friday, the salsa clubs might be empty, at least of Latinos. Still we had some luck. Outside one club, I gave a flyer to Javier, a longtime Colombian resident of Tel Aviv, who had two children that could potentially qualify for citizenship. After Javier left, Diego Manuel turned to me and told me that he hadn’t intended to give a flyer to him, because “everyone says that Javier is un sapo,” that is, “a toad.” Sapo is a colloquial term used across Latin America for someone who trucks in information and cozies up to authority, whether as a gossip or, as in this context, as a police informer.3 Diego Manuel worried that “maybe the police will come to El Festival.” I felt terrible. I said that I didn’t think anyone without children would come to the fund-raiser, meaning that those who would participate would be protected from deportation. Diego Manuel answered: “where there’s rumba, the people come.” The sapo made any large public gathering of Latinos risky, threatening to reverse the attraction of community gatherings because of the risk of arrests leading to deportation. The sapo, in other words, reminded Latinos of their demographic position, outside of the authorized population of the state of Israel, made deportable and therefore made pliant labor (De Genova 2002, 2010). The

El Sapo Speaks | 137 sapo further reminded Latinos of the “State” with a capital S (Taussig 1992): a thing that is fetishized, that is, one that through concerted effort seems to be coherent and ever present, almost magically so, and is made concrete in ways that obscure social relations.4 To use a different vocabulary, the sapo is a central way that Latinos “imagined” (Gupta 1995) the state to exist throughout their social worlds. This imagining occurs through discursive practices that help to ground the state’s existence, both in more spectacular public appearances as well as in more ordinary, everyday contexts. This imagining can even extend to someone handing out flyers for an event, as the fear of a raid by the immigration police becomes palpable. The way that the sapo emerges within the communicative circuits of Latinos in Israel also helps to spread fear. The sapo signals the boundary of secretive power that is marked off as part of producing the “mask” of the state (Abrams 1988; Nugent 2010; Taussig 1992). The figure of the sapo helped produce this boundary for Latinos: the state seemed to be everywhere, always about to arrive in the form of the police. Besides the more immediate result of an arrest, acts of informing also helped to generalize fear of the state. This fear suffused ever more the daily reality of noncitizen labor migrants, amplifying their sense of deportability. As many scholars have discussed, the appearance of a coherent state is one of the effects that is produced through the practices of statecraft, despite the many contradictory aspects of those practices and the multiple claimants to the mantle of the state.5 The state as a boundary of power is produced differently in different contexts, and this chapter concentrates in particular on how the police produced the voice of the state publicly, and how this voice worked in coordination with the police informer among Latinos. Latinos came to suspect that almost anyone familiar to them could be a sapo. That is, Latinos could not assume self-contained communicative circuits. To adapt Paul Kockelman’s (2010a) point from an essay on communications theories, the parasite—in this case the state in conjunction with the state’s agent, el sapo—actually is a crucial condition of Latino communicative circuits in Israel.6 The police informer also exemplifies how citizenship categories can be generated around complicity: state apparatuses can create an exceptional status for those who agree to collaborate, especially for non-normative (or non-ideal) populations. For thinking of these forms of complicity, Lisa Wedeen’s (1998) influential study is suggestive, as it emphasizes how authoritarian regimes can demand public displays of fealty as a means to authorize their rule. Although the sapo’s act of informing is not public in the same way, I tie it to a broader publicity campaign and discuss how informers can make ordinary spaces part of state-centric communicative circuits.7 Like the other aspects of Israeli citizenship previously discussed, the production of complicit subjects has a long history: the Israeli state apparatus and the proto-state Zionist apparatus of the British Mandate have always been heavily involved in producing collaborators, especially from within Palestinian

138  |  Latinos in Israel populations but also from Jewish ones.8 Palestinians (especially noncitizens)— which the Israeli political consensus takes as a national enemy—have always been targeted to become collaborators, sowing distrust as one of the mechanisms of colonial control. It is even possible to say that Israeli citizenship was born with the problem of including collaborators in mind.9 By using informers among Latinos and other unauthorized immigrants, the police thus implicitly compared them to the racialized national other. That is, the police considered foreign workers to belong to lines of descent that could not be incorporated in the Jewish nation, and could in fact endanger the Jewish nation.10 At the same time, this chapter describes some of the contradictory ways the state appeared through the campaign for citizenship. If their deportability was highlighted through the practices of the Immigration Police, it was through the campaign for citizenship that Latinos generated a response. As unauthorized immigrants, Latinos usually imagined the Israeli state through its coercive mechanisms—in particular through arrest and deportation. Despite all that, the campaign for citizenship enabled Latinos to imagine responding to the state and to make claims to its benevolence (see Riggan 2016). Despite the constant fear, Latinos could imagine their relation to the state in ways beyond their own deportability. They could imagine being citizens. This chapter begins by describing how Latino communicative circuits formed in relation to the state’s voice, as well as how the Israeli Immigration Police organized a publicity campaign as part of instituting its deportation policies. I  then discuss how Latinos faced this enforcement arm as they were stopped in the street or had their apartments raided. With this background, I  turn to describing the use of informers by the Immigration Police, and how Latinos discuss accusations that someone is a sapo as a kind of chisme (gossip). I then consider how the state made an alternative appearance through the campaign for citizenship. I end the chapter by describing Daniel, a Bolivian who, I came to realize after his deportation, must have been a sapo. Daniel’s case shows how the perspective of the state—and indeed the state’s voice—can be inhabited by Latinos, for example when they judge which Latinos are worthy of residing in Israel. These examples are intended to show the multiple ways that the state as a fetishized voice can appear for Latinos, and how this voice is reproduced by Latinos themselves. Equally important is looking at how this encounter with the voice of the state generates a response by Latinos.

The Multiple Appearances of the State in Latino Communicative Circuits How did Latinos come to hear the voice of the Israeli state? In particular, how did the fear of sapos emerge from Latinos’ sense that the Israeli state is a coherent and transcendent being, with a particular ideological stance? When it is assumed

El Sapo Speaks | 139 to be coherent, the state seems to have a distinct voice—part of its “subjective component,” as Begoña Aretxaga (2003, 395) called it—one that can appear as a kind of footing taken up by actors according to context. Scholarly work that takes up the questions of language and the state generally considers the mechanisms by which state organizations or important intellectuals are involved in standardizing national languages (e.g., Gal 2006; Haeri 2003; Heath 1980; Heller 2011; Inoue 2005). Joseph Errington (2001b) also looks at how “state speech,” a kind of voicing (after Bakhtin), is expressed by low-level officials among peripheral populations in acts of local governance. Others have carefully examined how low-level actors produce interdiscursive ties to policy in their immediate institutional contexts when they assume the mantle of the state (Carr 2011; Dick 2011). In these ways, the voice of the state emerges to interpellate participants into an ideological perspective, as Louis Althusser (1971) would put it—that is, the state’s voice addresses people in ways that place them as part of a broader social imaginary. Through the presence of the sapo, or the narration of stories about the sapo, the voice of the state can appear even without the immediate presence of an officially sanctioned agent of the state—without, for example, the presence of a police officer. Further, the sapo can articulate the ideological perspective of the state, claiming the authority to decide who can remain and who should be deported. Such claims are full of cruel irony as they reinforce the mechanisms of deportability that eventually engulf the sapo her- or himself.11 The Israeli state’s voice appeared in multiple ways for Latinos. Latinos, like other noncitizen labor migrants in the country, certainly imagined the state through their own deportability—for example, through the appearance of the Immigration Police in their workplaces, neighborhoods, and homes, and through the stories of roundups, arrests, and deportations. The appearance of the police interpellated Latinos into the ideological apparatus of citizenship: you, foreign workers, cannot be olim (authorized immigrants), that is, you are not Jewish subjects that can return to Israel from exile. You, many of the state’s various manifestations seemed to say to Latino unauthorized immigrants, are a demographic problem that hurts Israel. Many noncitizen Latinos had an answer to this interpellation: “nosotros queremos a este país” (we love this country).12 Further, this ideological response was encouraged through other appearances of the state outside of the Immigration Police and its practices. The campaign for citizenship for example produced another way that the state’s voice was incorporated into Latino communicative circuits. Moreover, the campaign produced the possibility for Latinos to respond to their deportability. As an example of this response, there is the case of two Colombian fathers who were attempting to return to Israel after having left. In July 2005, I briefly met these two fathers, who had managed to reenter Israel after a two-year absence.

140  |  Latinos in Israel Their children had grown up in Israel, but the families left around 2003 due to the mass arrests and increasing fear of deportation that came with the founding of the Immigration Police in 2002. As they told it, back in Colombia, they found their savings slowly drying up, and they were having trouble finding work. Then they heard about the campaign for children’s citizenship. They explained that one of their friends still in Israel had spoken to a lawyer, and the lawyer thought that if the children managed to return perhaps they would be included in any future government Resolutions for citizenship. In 2005, when I met them, the fathers had just arrived without their families and had begun to work. They were hoping beyond hope that their children would be allowed back in the country. They worried that border officials would deny their children entry. One of the fathers, Mauricio, told me that he “adores this country,” and that before leaving he had lived in Israel for twelve years happily, leading a good life. The Latinos’ response to their deportability, “we love this country,” was in essence so strong that these fathers were willing to risk a great deal of money on attempting to reenter with their families. The only way that the attempt to reestablish residence by these two Colombian fathers makes sense is in terms of the Israeli state’s appearance through the campaign for citizenship, and the transnational communicative circuits that formed around this news. The phrase “I adore this country” to justify the reentry to Israel comes about through a communicative process by which they heard about the campaign, and then found out about the possibility of their children potentially qualifying for citizenship. The information was not communicated directly, but was mediated via transnational circuits: they spoke with a Latino friend still in Israel who, on their behalf, spoke to a lawyer. The lawyer’s response was then relayed back through the friend. The fathers originally left Israel due to the effective fear produced by the Immigration Authority’s deportation campaign. The campaign for citizenship helped generate the response to this fear, “I adore this country.” The campaign for citizenship then provided a contrasting appearance of the Israeli state to the appearance of the state through arrest and deportation. One aspect that these appearances had in common was the mediation of Latino communicative circuits. Whether it was the figure of the sapo inducing anxiety, or the latest rumor (rumor) about the campaign for the rights of children, the discursive practices by which information disseminated among Latinos was crucial to their formation as subjects of the Israeli state. From their deportability to their potential citizenship, the circuits that formed as a result of these practices left their mark on how Latinos related to the state—on how they perceived, and thus came to imagine, the state’s voice. A good starting point to see the role that interactional practice and communicative circuits play in the relation between state and subject is Diego

El Sapo Speaks | 141 Manuel’s accusation from the opening vignette, which is delivered in the form of chisme:13 todo el mundo dice que Javier es un sapo. everyone says that Javier is an informer

Todo el mundo dice que is an evidential frame typical of the interactional practices of chisme (see chap. 4). In terms of the interactional event between Diego Manuel and me, the evidential frame signals that Diego Manuel is reporting an accusation that he heard elsewhere. By stating it with this frame, Diego Manuel further motivates or implicates a stance of uncertainty (Kockelman 2004) with respect to the accusation: he does not vouch for its accuracy as knowledge that he is fully committed to. On another level, the frame suggests a communicative collective that is passing on this accusation, which distributes responsibility for making the accusation to a number of anonymous others—a “hearsay public” (Yeh 2009). In other words, Diego Manuel shows his reflexive grasp of how accusations about sapos disseminate through Latino circuits.14 Such interactional practices comprise fertile grounds for fetishizing the state, even in intimate and familiar contexts. The sapo’s act of informing shows how the state “ground[s] its legal and policing capacities within intimate personal relations,” and thus the state comes to form in part around “the fear and uncertainty that mark the dark side of intimacy” (Kelly and Thiranagama 2010, 16). Sapos take advantage of familiar and intimate knowledge gained through their access to Latino communicative circuits. Indeed, attempts to ward off the Immigration Police, like Diego Manuel’s intention to exclude a suspected sapo by not handing him a flyer, show how those communicative circuits are always forming in relation to the parasitic role of the state. Although most studies of citizenship do not consider complicity as an essential aspect, much is at stake here. In exchange for information about the whereabouts of deportable Latinos, sapos in essence receive the capacity to remain in the country. Informers have their own peculiar category in regimes of citizenship: holders of a form of temporary residence that is only recognized by the police, who are the “street level bureaucrats” that make policy by carrying it out (Lipsky 1980). However, this peculiar and temporary status is not officially (and publicly) recognized throughout the rest of the state apparatus. Police informers essentially entered into a Faustian bargain with their handlers: as long as they continued to supply addresses where the police could arrest unauthorized labor migrants, they could remain in the country. Reports suggest that the temporary residence granted to informers always ended the moment that the informer could no longer help police arrest deportable people. In spite of these limitations, it is necessary to consider the category of informer to understand Latino experience of Israeli citizenship. Through a

142  |  Latinos in Israel long-term marketing campaign, the police were heavily invested in producing a public voice that called for citizens to inform on anyone employing an unauthorized immigrant.

The State’s Public Voice The sapo is not the only channel through which Latinos perceived the state’s voice. Generally, the state’s voice is associated with highly institutionalized contexts of public welfare or public authority, like bureaucracies, health care, schools, and police interrogation.15 Yet state organizations also fundamentally shape publicness. For example, by playing the role of sovereign, state organizations can define the limits of participation through spectacular forms of censorship (Mazzarella 2013). State actors also play a more active role in defining publicness, as when they become participants themselves. Most obviously, through public oratory (e.g., Bate 2009; Jackson 2013; Lempert and Silverstein 2012), politicians—as part of complex amalgams of mass mediated communication—help to shape political publics.16 Beyond political oratory, state bureaucracies and enforcement arms also produce a public address. This was the case for the massive campaign to directly deport noncitizens, or frighten them into “voluntarily” leaving, that started in 2002. As part of its mandate, the Immigration Police mounted a publicity campaign to produce fear of arrest and deportation among unauthorized immigrants. This campaign targeted employers as well, in ways that permeated the workplaces of unauthorized immigrants. The police sought to mobilize an Israeli national public and make it complicit in the state project of deporting thousands of unauthorized immigrants. That is, the deportability of these noncitizens was partially catalyzed through state-sponsored publicity. The rolling out of the Immigration Police, the main unit of the then fledgling Immigration Authority (minhelet hagira), in 2002 was accompanied by press releases, radio and television advertisements, and arrests that were covered by the news media. As Sarah Willen (2010, 283) notes, the campaign sought to criminalize unauthorized immigration through these public campaigns, as a means to produce public acceptance (or at least acquiescence) for mass deportations: “this newly created government body [Immigration Authority] sought to whip up the sort of xenophobic sentiment that could then be exploited in the service of the government’s agenda: the systematic and highly public criminalization of unauthorized migrants—and, as a ‘logical’ next step, their expulsion.” A year into the existence of the Immigration Authority, in September 2003, an investigative reporter for the broadsheet Haaretz, Sara Leibovitz-Dar, discussed the campaign by the police to produce fear, including the attempt to target the suburbs of Tel Aviv where unauthorized immigrants worked in middle- and upper-class homes.17 In an in-depth, 4000-word article, Leibovitz-Dar includes

El Sapo Speaks | 143 interviews with employers, labor migrants, officers from the Immigration Authority, several mayors, and human resource agencies, all part of discussing the production of the campaign as well as the mass fear it created. The campaign itself was called “House Cleaning” (nikayon batim), and the police officers in charge thought of it as marketing. Advertising was coordinated with raids and arrests. First, the police ran television and radio spots to warn against employing unauthorized immigrants at home, emphasizing the damage to the Israeli labor force. These spots, produced by a well-known marketing firm, emphasized the message “it hurts the economy,” where economy is presented as an entity that is abstract and pervasive yet practically unknowable (cf. Boyer 2007, 8). The police chose an experienced radio broadcaster, who according to the officer interviewed by Leibovitz-Dar “knows how to deliver a strong tone, not be demonic but deter.”18 According to the officers, they received hundreds of contacts as members of the public turned police informers and reported addresses of houses where foreign workers worked.19 Finally, the police brought reporters with them to raid those houses and caught a hundred or so labor migrants. They even timed the raids toward the beginning of the week to ensure a greater likelihood of reporter interest, and tried to find labor migrants at the homes of celebrities, like soccer players. The officers claimed that the interest of the news media was vital to gaining the desired “deterrence” (harta’a), and explained that they did not need to catch 1200 labor migrants; 120 would suffice. The deterrence, according to them, would do the rest. Leibovitz-Dar also quotes several employers, anxious about the possibility of the police raiding their homes as well as about the possibility of a fine. Many reported firing their domestic workers, or considering it, as a result. For example, one millionaire from the wealthy suburb of Savyon is quoted favorably comparing foreign workers to Israelis, yet states why she will not hire another: “They [foreign workers] are better [than Israelis], but I’m not willing to have them [the police] do searches in my house.”20 The mayor of that suburb, after receiving complaints about the police raids, wondered why the police could not simply round up foreign workers by the busload in south Tel Aviv: “For that, you don’t need to come to Savyon.”21 Israeli elites did not want their domestic intimacy put on public display, or have public authority displayed in their homes. Such public campaigns were periodically repeated during my fieldwork, and they show the strategy of saturating public space with the sense that the Immigration Police could find noncitizens anywhere. (Whether the police could or not is a separate question.) Latinos mentioned employer fears as reasons that they were sometimes fired from a job, and sometimes they heard the advertisements on television or radio. It also shows the degree to which producing a fearful atmosphere surrounding noncitizen immigration was institutionalized (Glaeser 2004, 2011), led by the Immigration Police.

144  |  Latinos in Israel In the marketing campaign, the voice of the broadcaster plays the role of the state that wants to protect the economy. For example, a television advertisement that was run frequently in the fall of 2005 showed a generic Israeli man in an elegant house. He turns on his television, as the voice-over intones, “Do the math. Every year, about 40,000 visitors stay in the country, who turn into illegal foreign workers.” As the man tries to ignore this information by changing the channel, the voice continues to impose, showing the numbers on the man’s television screen: “That means 110 a day.” The written numbers and messages pop out of the screen, entering the man’s intimate space, as the man turns off the television and walks to the fridge: “5 an hour.” These messages continue to pop out as he moves around the house, and he is told that “This means that the Israeli labor market is hurt.” Then, as he sits back down, apparently no longer able to ignore the crisis, the final message is shown in big yellow letters zooming over his head as he himself is overwhelmed by the state’s voice. He crouches back in his armchair, looking up at the message: “Employing foreign workers without a permit is illegal and is not worth it, not for you and not for the state.”22 The television advertisement not only poetically figures the state engulfing the elite Israeli—the state is present everywhere in his or her intimate domesticity— but does so with a recognizable radio voice. This voice of the Israeli state, figured through repeated television and radio advertisements, was a significant aspect in producing public authority for Israel’s migration regime. The complicit aspect of citizenship was brought into view as the police sought to mobilize the public to produce denunciations (see Fitzpatrick and Gellately 1996) against Israeli employers. A reference to this kind of complicit citizenship appeared briefly in Leibovitz-Dar’s Haaretz article about the police’s marketing campaign: Leibovitz-Dar questions the police officers about the information they received in response to their television and radio spots: “you mean that people informed? [The police officers] Yafe and Fridman burst into laughter and answer together: ‘It’s not informing, it’s good citizenship.’” The advertisements also seemed to suggest that the wealthy, mostly Ashkenazi elite were being disloyal to the state by hiring foreign workers. This relation between publicness, informing, and citizenship is crucial, yet not exactly in the terms suggested by the police officers. More than citizens’ informing as part of a mobilized public, noncitizen police informers extended that publicity campaign. Police informers were used widely by the Immigration Police, as came to light. Further, by using informers with noncitizen foreign workers, the Immigration Police were implicitly comparing them to noncitizen Palestinians, who are often pressured into informing (Gordon 2008; Kelly 2010).23 The use of informers by the Immigration Police came under journalistic scrutiny precisely for this reason. In June 2005, the Channel 2 investigative news program uvda (Fact) ran a segment on this issue, where they interviewed four different

El Sapo Speaks | 145 police informers as well as an anonymous former Immigration Police officer, who speaks as a darkened figure. The segment opens with the anchor talking with the journalist in studio about the ethics of using informers with unauthorized labor migrants. The journalist notes that informers are used by the secret service and the police, and that the procedure is justified in the case of catching drug traffickers or “ticking time-bombs.” With this latter term, she chiefly means the possibility of attacks from Palestinian armed groups. In contrast, she reflected, with labor migrants, it is perhaps like “shoot[ing] a cannon at a fly.” Labor migrants perhaps run afoul of administrative laws, but, she asserted, they do not endanger human life. To show how the procedure is like shooting a cannon at a fly, the journalist interviews the informers and tells of the kind of psychological pressure applied by the police. All the informers described the two tactics used by police handlers: both intimidating them as well as (falsely) promising them permanent residence status if they collaborate. If they did not supply more information, they were constantly harassed. The former police officer confirmed the use of false promises about gaining the right of residence, also stating that it was well known among officers to be a lie, but that there were quotas the police were expected to fill. The former officer further explained that all the informers with whom he worked eventually were deported themselves. Two police handlers were specifically mentioned, one of which, Alan Abshalom, was a name I had heard already, as I will discuss below. After reviewing the questionable police tactics, the journalist asks the former police officer at the end of the segment: “what happened to us, as a society, as police, as human beings?” The police officer answers in the genre of the soldier reflecting on a mission gone wrong, shooting a cannon at a fly: Dunno, maybe we became animals a bit, maybe the mission was too big, maybe the numbers [of the quota] weren’t proportional. But we learned in the army that “Ready, charge!” [kadima hista’er] is “Ready, charge!” At first, you don’t think long term. The doubts come later. We acted like machines. It’s simple. We got a quota, we had to fill the bus, and when it was their turn, it was their turn.

The policeman’s answer indexes the problem of treating unauthorized immigrants through military-like thinking, which is usually reserved for national enemies. The journalist on the other hand wants to underline that foreign workers are not Palestinian attackers, but she does so only by emphasizing how both are treated similarly. Or, to put it another way: in this segment, foreign workers are like Palestinians in that they are racially not of the Jewish nation, but unlike the Palestinians because they do not constitute a national enemy. The procedure of using police informers with unauthorized immigrants produced collective public discomfort for these reasons, displayed in the final

146  |  Latinos in Israel words of the former police officer. While answering phone calls at the Hotline for Migrant Workers (an NGO for labor migrant rights), I often heard this discomfort from employers when the unauthorized immigrant who worked at their homes was arrested. It showed the difficulty of maintaining the public criminalization and racialization of unauthorized immigrants: contradicting the police campaign, some Israelis were willing to countenance the possibility that foreign workers could receive a more permanent status. The Immigration Police’s sanctioned lie to informers about remaining in Israel produced temporary respite from deportation in return for the service of informers. At the same time, informers represent the interpellative voice of the state in the most intimate noncitizen contexts. As Tobias Kelly and Sharika Thiranagama put it (see above), the “dark side of intimacy” arises because someone familiar can be an informer or collaborator, working for the state. There is constant fear. Is it possible to pass out flyers about an Escuelita event or not? Who is a sapo? Who can be trusted?

Deportability and Policing Despite the Immigration Police’s publicity campaign, most undocumented Latinos managed to keep their jobs, although periodically I heard of exceptions. The impact on Latinos’ jobs between 2004 and 2007 was probably only minor. More significant was the way such publicity helped produce a message that could disseminate through communicative circuits and put pressure on unauthorized immigrants. For example, in mid-July 2005, one Colombian, Jimena, told me that she was let go after an employer saw one of the television advertisements. This occurred just after the first government Resolution granting citizenship to a small number of children of unauthorized immigrants, although it excluded most Latino kids. Interestingly, the employer went beyond firing her. She also told Jimena that the labor migrants with children had only until August 31 to leave the country. It is not clear where Jimena’s employer got her information, although there was a common rumor that the police would start deporting families with children who might qualify for citizenship.24 More importantly, Jimena’s employer took on the role of immigration official, and helped to activate the communicative circuit between state and labor migrant, by relaying what she understood as the current government policy. For Latinos and other unauthorized immigrants, Immigration Police officers themselves played a more important role than this publicity campaign. The Immigration Police played an entirely different role in Latino worlds than for the upper-crust Israelis who employed Latinos. The presence of police in Latino worlds was constant, producing the kind of harassment that amplified Latinos’ sense of their deportability. Latinos spoke constantly of the psychological pressure that they were under, and of their anxieties about being deported. Many

El Sapo Speaks | 147 mentioned Latinos who had left the country “voluntarily,” no longer able to stand the constant sight of the police or the frequent stories—often spread by police officers themselves—that one day the police could even arrest children at school. Luna, a Colombian mother with a quick wit, had a term for the families that left due to this pressure (with uncanny resonance to American immigration politics): “se autodeportaron” (they deported themselves).25 The two Colombian fathers mentioned above, who had left of their own accord and then attempted to reenter, are one example of this self-deportation. “Self-deportation” worked through the atmosphere of fear, and it was very effective, especially at the beginning of the Immigration Authority’s reign. According to the authority’s own statistics, by mid-April 2004 (a year and a half after its founding), 14,294 people were deported, meaning they were arrested prior to being processed, while another 1003 waited in jail—this was more than in the five years between 1995 and 1999 combined (cited in Kemp and Raijman 2004, 34). In contrast, more than double the number of people had, to use the Authority’s lingo, “left voluntarily” (azvu miratson): 33,717.26 The Immigration Authority took credit for both those they directly deported as well as those who left. It is impossible to tell how many who left were thinking of doing so anyway. But no doubt the enormous jump in the pace of deportation, and the ubiquitous sense that the police were everywhere, helped to spur thousands. For unauthorized immigrants, the state’s voice found one of its most immediate manifestations in the person of the police officer from the Immigration Authority. If the Immigration Police’s publicity campaigns included occasional sweeps of the houses of the wealthy, they regularly and systematically surveilled the streets of south Tel Aviv, the residential neighborhood of many noncitizens. Bus stops in particular were favorite hunting grounds for the police. Indeed, the reason many noncitizens lived in south Tel Aviv, besides the historically lower rents, was the proximity to the central bus station and the multiple bus lines that ran throughout the Tel Aviv region. A different version of the voice of the state was developed by the practices of the immigration police in their sweeps of these streets. In these encounters, the police applied enormous pressure to any unauthorized immigrants that were temporarily immune from deportation, often by exaggerated or even intentionally distorting information about deportations. I  heard many reports about the encounters with immigration police, both directly from Latinos as well as while volunteering at the Hotline for Migrant Workers. As noted above, during the time of my fieldwork, there was a quiet official moratorium against deporting parents. Yet noncitizen Latino parents who were stopped reported that the police told them that the moratorium would end, or that their children did not qualify. Often, the police would take parents for processing at a station, holding them until someone brought proof that their

148  |  Latinos in Israel child was in Israel. Those who were detained reported that the police called this a “baby visa.” The police often released detainees only after several hours, causing them to lose half a day or a full day’s work. Such police harassment was constant. For example, Estela, a Colombian mother to two teenage daughters, called me after the police had arrived at her apartment at four in the morning. She reported that they knocked loudly for fifteen minutes, “as if they were going to knock down the door.”27 When Estela finally opened the door, three officers entered and showed her a document—probably a search warrant—which one of her daughters read. Estela further reported that they told her that the document was obtained because she is Colombian and illegal. After searching the whole house for thirty minutes, and taking down her passport information, they left. As a parting shot, one officer warned Estela that she had to leave, and that she should not wait until he came back to arrest her with her daughters. Clearly such statements were meant to produce pressure on these precarious families in an attempt to induce them to leave. Melisa, a Colombian mother of two, used to see the police on her way to the bus stop in the morning and was stopped frequently (despite the immunity from deportation offered by her children). She often called me after these experiences. One day the police detained her for processing and told her that she had until the end of the month to leave the country. Melisa got in touch with Diego Manuel and me, and we in turn put her in touch with the Hotline. According to what Melisa told us, the police insisted that since her daughter had not yet been in the country five years, Melisa did not qualify for the temporary moratorium on deporting parents.28 This was of course not true, yet this voice of the state managed to challenge her certainty that she had a citizen-like claim to remain in Israel. Melisa explained that she was so nervous that she gave the police her phone number. It sounded like the officers were sizing Melisa up for the “voluntary” program to leave the country, in which the Immigration Authority would pay for a plane ticket for each family member. Melisa was told to come and deliver documents to the police station. Later on, the police called her to tell her to come and pick up her plane tickets. Melisa told us (and the Hotline) that she had never agreed to leave the country. The police were using a combination of distortion and bureaucratic pressure to try to get Melisa to agree to leave, supposedly voluntarily. The contact with the Hotline helped counteract the pressure from the police. After that experience, Melisa told me that she began to take roundabout paths to her bus stop so she could see if the bus was coming as well as monitor if the police were in the vicinity. The police harassment sometimes worked. In one case, I received a call from a woman to tell me that her sister, Marisol, had just been detained. I quickly called Marisol to let her know that she did not have to disclose any information, and that if the police were to insist, she could ask to talk to someone from the

El Sapo Speaks | 149 Hotline. Marisol told me that the police were shouting at her and insulting her because she refused to give them her address. The police were trying to turn her into a sapa of sorts: Marisol was protecting her sister who was in the apartment. When I talked to the Hotline, they had already heard of her case, and a police officer had told the Hotline that they would release Marisol the moment she revealed her residence. Marisol, it turned out later, had a child who was eight and a half, which should have made her immune from such treatment. When I called Marisol back, she told me that she had already been released, and had decided to leave the country. I do not know if she actually left, but the episode shows how the harassment itself was part of creating a state presence in the lives of Latinos. Estela and Melisa both withstood the pressure. Their deportability however was at the center of the police officers’ communication with them. The officers outright lied or exaggerated in order to convince them to leave the country. Importantly, the officers’ communication with noncitizen immigrants was a streetlevel manifestation of the “House Cleaning” marketing campaign described in the article by Sara Leibovitz-Dar. The officers who showed up at four in the morning, or who stopped noncitizens at bus stops, were not simply harassing them but also extending that publicity evermore into the lived spaces of unauthorized immigrants. The overall message, that unauthorized immigrants (supposedly) damage the Israeli economy, was thus brought home to Latinos.

Suspicion and the Circuits of Chisme Every Latino in Israel was suspect. At some point or other, I heard the accusation of sapo made about nearly every adult Latino that I knew. The very fact that a Latino adult had escaped deportation made him or her suspect in some other Latino’s eyes.29 The suspicion was doubly true for men, who were more likely to be deported before the formation of the Immigration Police (2002).30 I even heard stories from some people who knew why they were suspected of being sapos, and their explanations of why it was not true. One such story: the police came to our apartment because we were holding classes in preparation to convert to Judaism, and that night, we weren’t at home with everyone else because we had to rush our son to the emergency room. Contingency or part of a state circuit of informing? These webs of suspicion point to the deep intimacy of the state’s voice, and to a reflexivity about the interdiscursive dissemination of information. The creation of suspicion and secrecy, and withholding information, has long been recognized as a means by which the state is reified (or even fetishized) (Abrams 1988, esp. 61–63). Like the parasite discussed by Kockelman, the sapo stands between the circuits considered to be internal to Latino communicative collectivity and the circuits that form by engaging with the state in its guise as police.31 As discussed in chapter 4, especially on important matters Latinos did not fully trust

150  |  Latinos in Israel information received from another Latino. Sapos—and the suspicion that someone familiar might be a sapo—was one of the reasons for this distrust. There is an important dynamism here. The sapo masks the state’s policing activity in Latino spaces, and yet also activates the circuits between Latinos and the state. The sapo helps to form a connection between these circuits and also to dissolve Latino community. Further, even the term sapo, like the term chismoso (someone who likes to gossip), reveals a reflexivity of the patterns of dissemination. The very act of calling someone a sapo is a remark on the circuits of dissemination he or she helps to form. Not surprisingly, the accusations about who was a sapo were a regular feature of conversation among Latinos, especially after the police arrived at an apartment or at a salsa club. These conversations were dense and piquant stories, replete with calculations about the events preceding the arrests, who was arrested and released, and who could have known where the arrested lived. For example, after a meeting of La Escuelita, Diego Manuel and I ended up talking to Luna, whom we both knew well and respected. The conversation became a very juicy gossip session. Among the good chisme Luna told us was how a woman who was recently arrested, called Nancy, accused someone of being a sapa based on a visit the accused had paid to her and another Colombian who was arrested. The communicative circuits that form out of the practices of telling (or entextualizing) chisme were made explicit in Luna’s recounting of the events. According to Luna, who reported to us what Nancy told her—thus making the path of information explicit—the accused sapa had asked Nancy for her address because she wanted to meet up with two friends later at the salsa. Here is the sapa’s voice, echoing in Luna’s report, serving the police and also anticipating the police’s question: “what is the address?” But why, asked Nancy and thus also asked Luna, did the accused sapa need Nancy’s address if she planned to meet up with her friends at the salsa club? Only a sapo would need to know. Luna presented us with more evidence: Nancy was good friends with the mother of the boyfriend of the accused sapa, and yet that friend didn’t call Nancy while she was in prison. Diego Manuel and Luna both agreed that not phoning a friend in prison could only be due to embarrassment, and thus an index that the sapa was a close family member. In our chisme session, Diego Manuel and Luna could evaluate evidence together about how seemingly intimate interactional events were actually reconnaissance for the state, in its guise as the Immigration Police. The sapo’s work for the state, and the speech act of informing, helps to recursively produce the state’s voice within intimate Latino contexts, beyond the immediate act of arrest. “What is the address?” The voice of the state. Whether that question really was asked by the accused sapa, and whether Nancy really did report it to Luna, during the chisme session Diego Manuel, Luna, and even I were interpellated by

El Sapo Speaks | 151 the state without the immediate presence of a police officer, arousing more fear about the state’s magical ability to find Latinos wherever they may be. The fear of the sapo was always present, hovering over any interactional event—a parasite that is a condition of the communicative circuit. Luna told us another story that shows how the figure of the sapo, the familiar performer of the state’s voice, maintained that presence, requiring delicate maneuvering in otherwise ordinary contexts. Luna told us a story about how Michelle, a Chilean woman who had legal residence, had threatened once to send the police after her. When Luna saw her in a salsa club, Luna slapped Michelle. Later, Luna’s Argentinean (citizen) boyfriend convinced her that she should worry about the police, and Luna ended up apologizing to Michelle. In our chisme session, this was one example of the delicate question of how to treat someone thought to be a sapo, knowing that the sapo has connections with the police. What is the right amount of familiarity to show, conceived in terms of educación (politeness, see chap. 2)? Luna said of another widely accused sapo, Eduardo Isaac, that if she saw him at a salsa club or the like, and he said, “Qué hubo?” (What’s up?), then she would return the greeting. Likewise, Diego Manuel, after hearing the story about Nancy and the sapa, said he does not know the accused sapa very well, but that he would be forced to greet her if he saw her. Such accused sapos were to be addressed with at least a modicum of educación, or as Luna and Diego Manuel put it, “se tratan” or “se pasan” (they are acknowledged). As opposed to a former friend with whom one no longer speaks, the accused sapo is dangerous and therefore requires careful treatment. Latinos could not afford to snub a sapo. The interpellation of the state, as enacted by the accused sapo, requires a response.32 That response can be of a more phatic variety (a simple show of uptake to signal an open communication channel) as when Diego Manuel or Luna return the greeting of the suspected sapo. Or that response can become a more ubiquitous and public one, one that is generated collectively and helps mobilize citizen participation. The response of many Latinos was to declare their love for the state.

Communicating with the State The deportability of Latinos was not their only relation to the state. The Immigration Police and the sapo were not the only way they were interpellated by the state, and not the only way they were addressed by the state’s voice. Latinos, like other unauthorized immigrants, and really like all citizens, were in a complex communicative relation with state apparatuses. The communication involved circuits formed around the campaign for citizenship, which helped make Latinos’ collective response, “we love this country,” relative to public debates. No doubt, the ability to make such a collective response was instigated in part by some of

152  |  Latinos in Israel the citizen-like claims that Latinos, like other unauthorized immigrants, had accrued despite their noncitizen status. That is, Latinos in Israel worked, rented apartments, attended school, and received some minimal health care and welfare help, among other benefits seemingly reserved only for citizens. Even prior to the  campaign for citizenship, Latinos thus developed multiple relations to the state as a benefactor. Yet nothing channeled Latinos’ positive relation to the Israeli state like the campaign for citizenship. Starting in 2002, when the rate of deportation increased dramatically, and continuing to 2010 and to some extent still as of this writing, several human rights NGOs and allied organizations waged a campaign to advocate for the children of foreign workers, to have them accepted as “Israeli for all intents and purposes” and thus receive formal citizenship. Family members, either parents or siblings, would gain citizenship by extension. Partial victories saw Resolutions, including ever more children, passed in 2005, 2006, and 2010. The campaign channeled Latinos’ interest in the happenings of the political public sphere of Israel. Latinos came to see their interests being represented by advocacy organizations. For example, NGOs answered constant questions about the latest government policies, held large meetings with parents, helped them prepare files to turn in to the Ministry of Interior, wrote incensed letters to the police about parents who had been arrested contrary to Ministry policy, and the like. As a volunteer with several of the advocacy organizations, as well as an ethnographer deeply embedded in Latino networks, I became part of the forming circuits as this response was generated. Sometimes, employers would be Latinos’ first source on the latest information related to the campaign, and then at some point I would be asked to confirm. Other times, I was the first person approached by Latinos to receive explanations or advice on how to proceed. In fact, even when I was invited to Latino birthday parties and other social functions, I  would be approached by several people to receive updates or to check on rumors. Telephone calls came in waves, often set off by news coverage of the campaign or stories shared by Latinos’ employers. With the campaign, the state’s voice—recognizing labor migrant children or not, placing a moratorium on the deportation of their parents or not—reached Latinos through the highly articulated circuits of news coverage, employers, and especially advocacy NGOs. Latino circuits came alive with any new information about the campaign, about supposed deadlines that came and went, and especially by any of the usually false reports that a parent had been arrested. Communication more typical of participatory acts of citizenship, like learning about the latest Ministry policy, crossed those circuits as much as stories about the more ominous acts of informing to the police. Bureaucrats became quite certain of the efficacy of these circuits. For example, when the government passed its first Resolution concerning labor

El Sapo Speaks | 153 migrant children in June 2005, part of the application for the newly granted status involved preparing files for the Ministry of Interior with proof that the child had lived in Israel, and had been educated in Hebrew. The official protocol stated that the Resolution would be advertised in two newspapers, one of which would be in English (i.e., in order to disseminate information about the Resolution). However, the Ministry of Interior also made certain to call one of the human rights NGOs, as well as two other organizations, and send over the necessary forms.33 Ministry officials were quite certain that these channels would reach all the intended beneficiaries. On one occasion, as a deadline to submit applications approached, I tried to convince one official to accept an application late. I explained patiently that the family involved lived in an isolated farming community, having only occasional contact with other Latinos, and for that reason had not heard about the deadline. The official refused the request. He responded that he had greater experience with foreign workers than me and that he was positive that there was no way that the family could not have received word. Officially, the publication of the information occurred only in Hebrew and English in newspapers that many labor migrants probably did not access, and unofficially, the information was sent through several organizations that did have established relations with labor migrants. Given these access points, the official was certain that no Latino could remain out of the state’s earshot. Besides producing the conditions for Latinos’ response to their deportability, this highly articulated communication between Latinos and state officials also produced the conditions for complicity with the state. Latinos generally identified with the Israeli consensus on most political matters. For example, Latinos did not often challenge Israeli practices that produced Palestinians as the national enemy, showing how, to use Vaclav Havel’s phrase, “everyone is both a victim and a supporter of the system” (cited in Wedeen 1998, 517). Just as sapos could help produce the state, unauthorized immigrants more generally could also accept and reproduce its legitimating ideologies.

El Sapo Speaks I knew a sapo. I only realized this after he had already been deported, when I saw the segment mentioned above on the news program uvda, where I heard the name of the Immigration Police officer Alan Abshalom. I met Daniel early in my fieldwork, before I had heard about the use of police informers. Daniel was from Bolivia, and in 2005 he had lived about ten years in Israel. According to his own narrative, Daniel had not come to Israel out of financial need. Brought up by an Evangelical Protestant mother and grandmother, he insisted that he had come to Israel to better understand the Holy Land, and then ended up staying because he fell into debt.34 The Latino Evangelical churches

154  |  Latinos in Israel in Israel promulgated a Christian Zionist message, and the most active members identified thoroughly with the Israeli state. Daniel embodied this kind of identification, and he saw his role entirely as part of supporting the state’s goals (as he understood them). In particular, Daniel thought he helped the police to catch undesirable Latinos. Ironically, Daniel got in touch with me after his connections with police failed him. He called me after his girlfriend was arrested, because I was a volunteer with the Hotline. His girlfriend (from Ecuador) was undergoing psychotherapeutic treatment, and, according to Daniel, the arrest had caused a regression in her mental health. He wanted to have her released prior to her departure back to Ecuador, so that her condition would improve and she would be allowed to fly. This was a typical case for the Hotline at that time. Already in our second telephone conversation about his girlfriend’s case, Daniel mentioned to me that he knew an officer from the Immigration Police—Alan Abshalom. Daniel said this without embarrassment, and also told me that Abshalom had not been able to help his girlfriend. That is, after his connections with police officers failed him, he turned to using an NGO to become his intermediary with the state apparatus: he shifted from framing his request entirely within the reciprocal relation he had developed with the apparatus of the state to framing his request via the voice of human rights. Daniel knew many police officers, it seems. Javier, the Colombian father Imentioned at the outset, told me this after Daniel had been deported. These connections allowed Daniel a strong sense of what he could ask from the police. This position was also something that Daniel could extend to other Latinos and improve his own standing with them. For example, Javier told me that when he (Javier) wanted to file charges against someone and was worried about approaching the police, Daniel had accompanied him and introduced him to officers. Javier was grateful because as a result of his filing he received a document every month that attested to the court proceeding and thus was (more) immune from deportation. As Javier put it, “one feels protected.” Daniel had helped mediate Javier’s case with the police, and thus Javier gained some conditional recognition of a temporary status in the country. Further, Daniel had magnified his own status vis-à-vis other Latinos. Daniel’s status was on Javier’s mind, for example, when he heard that Daniel was arrested and deported. Like other Latinos who knew Daniel, Javier was surprised to hear of the deportation, explaining that when they went to the police station together, “Daniel knew all the police.” For obvious reasons, undocumented Latinos feared approaching the police and often sought help in doing so from NGO advocates. Daniel’s connections to the police enabled him to act in this intermediary role. Daniel himself explained to me once how he had come to be so well connected to the police, and how his connections even led him to seek to regularize his

El Sapo Speaks | 155 status. The subject came up because he told me that he was gathering documents to prove his Jewish ancestry, and that he had been to the Ministry of Interior to check on his eligibility and to start a proceso (procedure). I asked Daniel if it was due to this procedure that he managed to avoid deportation. He answered me with a long explanation about how he had worked in the houses of many high-ranking police officers, and even in the houses of assassinated former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Rabin’s daughter, Dalia.35 Daniel did not mention any pressure tactics from the police as reason for working for them. Instead, Daniel seemed to assimilate the state’s voice into his own and suggested his role was to help find undesirable Latinos. On the other hand, it does seem that the police offered Daniel the false promise of gaining eventual citizenship (as the uvda segment mentioned), since he went to the trouble of starting a procedure with the Ministry of Interior. Outside of such reasons for working with the police, what Daniel spoke of many times was his ability to help the police find criminals among Latinos. For example, he spoke about helping the police catch Colombian drug dealers and escaped convicts, and especially of helping to solve the murder of a money-changer in the mid-nineties. Daniel did consider that there were limits to his relation with the police: when he was arrested, he told me that he was not willing to give people’s addresses, and this is why he did not receive help from the police officers that he knew. This rationalization of helping the police to arrest criminals among the labor migrants was one that I heard on a couple of other occasions, but not from anyone else who was directly informing. One longtime Colombian resident reported that her cousin had worked with the police. According to her, this cousin stated that he sent the police only after viciosos, the depraved. She also stated that her cousin was an upright person and that he worked hard and would not just let himself be taken away. Daniel and others who similarly saw themselves as upholding a moral order were participating in the fetishizing of the state. They helped to produce the fetish of the criminal from those who bear an uncanny resemblance to themselves (Aretxaga 2003, 402–3). Daniel took his position of directing the apparatus of justice seriously. On one occasion, Daniel called me to tell me a story about an Israeli of Argentinean provenance, Bat Ami, whom he considered a scam artist. To explain his concerns about Bat Ami, Daniel recounted his meeting with a Colombian professional, who was returning to Colombia after only a month and a half. The story Daniel heard was that many Colombians had responded to an advertisement about professional work in Israel with a visa, with wages of $1200 per month, especially for health care specialists. On arrival, Bat Ami put them up in an apartment six to a room, and several were given work in positions for which they had not trained (like construction). As a result, many were already leaving. Daniel was calling me to see if there was something that could be done to

156  |  Latinos in Israel put a stop to this fraud. He mentioned also a Bolivian who claimed to have been defrauded of $9000 by Bat Ami. (I had no way of investigating Daniel’s stories.) The problem, according to Daniel, was that Bat Ami seemed to have many friends among the police. Although nothing came of this telephone conversation, Daniel was clearly looking to see if any of my connections, for example with NGOs, could lead to some form of action against Bat Ami. Here, public authority, and responsibility for public authority, is claimed by the sapo, suggesting a collective order whereby the Latinos can be contributing members of a Jewish-Israeli nation. Such a statement has been at times called an ethnicizing move by scholars of the United States to discuss how immigrant groups make claims to national belonging (Williams 1989; Urciuoli 1996). Through his informing, and his rationalization of informing, Daniel sought to make such a claim on behalf of the morally upright Latinos who contribute to the Israeli state’s own goals. To use the words of the police officers from the Leibovitz-Dar article, Daniel saw his informing as “good citizenship.”

Conclusion The voice of the state is a public voice of authority. Diego Manuel’s fears, described at the outset, about the police arriving at El Festival represent the Latinos’ apprehension of how they are subject to the state. The state always seems present, cohesive, listening or speaking through a person familiar to you—el sapo. This relation with the coercive apparatus of the Israeli state has often been pointed out. Latinos’ lack of citizenship clearly was constantly on their minds, partly because of sapos and partly because of police who pound at the door at four in the morning. Their relation to the state was not limited to such policing techniques, however. The Immigration Police ran television and radio spots to warn about the employment of foreign workers. The message conveyed through this publicity, that foreign workers damage the economy, then had another manifestation in the form of the police officer who made an arrest, or a sapo who relayed an address. This campaign demonstrated the complex tangles between citizenship, deportation, and publicness. The police tried to mobilize the Israeli public to isolate those who employ foreign workers illegally, and thus they endorsed an act of complicity as a basis for citizenship. When the police started using informers, they produced a peculiar status in Israel’s citizenship regime. Informers could stave off deportation as long as they continued to inform. Their limited protection was recognized by the police, but no more. This is obviously not the same as gaining formal citizenship, but the exception is important. Moreover, sapos could extend their protection to selected Latinos, as Daniel did with Javier, while other Latinos became more vulnerable. Through the use of informers, the Immigration Police produced

El Sapo Speaks | 157 an exception to the deportability of some noncitizens while amplifying the deportability of the rest. The claims of the sapo to the ideological authority of the state open up questions of citizenship and complicity in Israel/Palestine. As I noted, Israeli citizenship and Israeli use of collaborators were forged together, and Israeli state apparatuses have constantly produced complicit subjects, chiefly among Palestinians. Racialized and excluded people—the populations considered to be outside of the nation—can, in a sense, gain some limited benefits by being disloyal to those they know best. When the Immigration Police turned this mechanism on unauthorized immigrants, it created great ambivalence for many Israelis: do foreign workers deserve such draconian policing tactics, as the uvda segment asked. If the figure of the noncitizen labor migrant seems surrounded by and subjected to deportation regimes, it is equally important to see that noncitizens can and do find themselves making claims to citizenship in response. To ignore these responses ends up portraying the unauthorized immigrant as only able to be “in the shadows,” subjected only to their deportability. If a sapo like Daniel represents one possible citizen-like response, another is how Mauricio declares his patriotic love for this country in the context of a public campaign for citizenship. These two faces suggest, perhaps, the way that acting for the state always accompanies the act of responding to the state. Or, to put it another way: despite our ideals of citizenship, complicity accompanies the paradigmatic act of speaking publicly like a citizen. The levels of fear produced by the Israeli state’s voice in Latino worlds required a response. The birth of the Immigration Police in 2002 already created public resistance, especially from liberal Israeli quarters, which manifested itself publicly in demonstrations, op-ed pieces, film screenings, and the like (see Paz 2016). Further, the resistance brought about the formation of NGOs dedicated to representing the rights of unauthorized immigrants. As a result of this public resistance, there was one group of noncitizens that could not easily be deported: children of unauthorized immigrants who spoke Hebrew like Israeli children. To stave off deportation and to claim citizenship, the children themselves had to appear in public—chiefly via news and current affairs media—speaking Hebrew in ways that were considered native. In a sense, they were responding to the publicity campaign of the Immigration Authority. The repercussions of their public appearances were widespread. Three right-wing prime ministers, Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert, and Binyamin Netanyahu, all delayed the campaigns to arrest and deport such children (with their families), often at the eleventh hour. The public display of children’s innocent voices was crucial to combatting the pervasive deportation regime. The next chapter discusses the

158  |  Latinos in Israel complex relation that formed between the NGOs that sought to advocate for the rights of labor migrant children, and the youth who actually appeared in public.

Notes 1. See chapter 3 for more on La Escuelita and El Festival. 2. Although NGOs involved in the matter tried, it was not always possible to get written confirmation from the Ministry of Interior about this (always temporary) policy. 3. For example, in Naomi Schiller’s (2011, 117) description of the tensions in Venezuela between the commercial and the state media, she mentions that a journalist from commercial television called journalists working for the state-funded community outlet “sapografo” or, as Schiller translates it, “journalist-spy.” 4. For useful comments on totality with respect to the state, see Chris Krupa (2010, 323–25). 5. This approach has been particularly influential after Philip Abrams’s (1988) seminal paper. See among others Allen (2013), Aretxaga (2003), Gupta (1995), Krupa (2010), Özyürek (2004), Navaro-Yashin (2002), Nugent (2010), Riggan (2016), Stein (2012), and Taussig (1992, 1997). 6. Through a reading of linguist Roman Jakobson and philosopher of science Michel Serres, among others, Kockelman argues that channels should be understood as a “relation to a relation” (2010a, e.g., 410), rather than simple edges connecting nodes. The parasite that Serres described is one such relation to a relation. 7. I am here glossing over a complex question: how to adapt Wedeen’s framework taken from an obviously authoritarian regime, that of Hafez el-Assad’s Syria, to one that, like Israel, is generally understood to have a relatively open public sphere, at least for Jewish citizens. The public sphere works differently in cases like Israel’s, and yet I would note that it is too facile to see public spheres like Israel’s as devoid of authoritarian aspects, and further to accept the assumption that political systems exist (e.g., in the North Atlantic) where liberal participants say in public only what they truly and sincerely are committed to in private. These considerations call for more elaboration than space allows. 8. On the long colonial history of the British and Israeli practice of using informers, see H. Cohen (2008, 2010), Gordon (2008, 42–47), Kelly (2006, 87–89; 2010), and Robinson (2013). Although Cohen does not describe Jews as collaborators in Mandate Palestine, he does describe several instances where the intelligence services called upon Jewish residents to pass on information about any Palestinians they knew (e.g., 2008, 177–79). In other words, collaboration develops over a communicative circuit that implicates many actors—it is not just the “traitor” to the nation who collaborates with an “enemy.” The complicated process of creating complicity also appears in the treatment of Jews who arrived from Arab-majority countries (whose descendants are generally referred to as Mizrahi today). Shenhav (2006, 1–7) notes how some were drafted into the intelligence services when they arrived, due to their knowledge of Arabic language and culture. 9. The historian Shira Robinson (2013, 88–112) discusses how passage of a citizenship law was, at the outset of the Israeli state, long held back as Israeli leaders considered how to limit the rights of Palestinians exiled during the 1947–1949 wars, on the one hand, and on the other hand, how to incorporate the remaining Palestinians, especially those that had collaborated with the newly independent state. My reading of her history is that complicity became a foundational aspect of Israeli citizenship.

El Sapo Speaks | 159 10. In this chapter I often analyze the perspective of the police, and so on occasion I will use the state’s preferred term “foreign worker.” 11. Here and throughout, I seek to maintain a description of the coercive mechanisms associated with the state as always involving a discursive aspect. I do this to avoid a reductive position that associates the consensual or legitimating aspects of state authority with discursive phenomena while associating coercion with violence on bodies. 12. See in particular chapters 1 and 3. 13. Accusations of collaboration often travel through less official, less recognized channels described as gossip and rumor, and the accusations can have a global or transnational dimension (e.g., Allen 2013, 53). 14. This reflexivity is not unlike that which Michael Warner famously described about publics, “the social space created by the reflective circulation of discourse” (2002b, 62), although he was thinking about more authoritative participants. 15. See among others Carr (2011), Cody (2013), Gupta (1995), Hajjar (2005), Handelman (2004), Herzfeld (1992), Hull (2012), Kaplan (2006), Riggan (2016). 16. Especially interesting in the case of Israel, state organizations can also attempt to address and shape a more global publicness, as when the Israeli military and Foreign Ministry keep a social media presence (Stein 2012). 17. Sara Leibovitz-Dar, “So who will wash the floors?” [in Hebrew], Haaretz, September 17, 2003, http://www.haaretz.co.il/misc/1.911235. 18. Ibid. Leibovitz-Dar is quoting the police officer. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. ha’asakat ovdim zarim belo heyter ze lo xuki velo mishtalem, lo lexa velo lamedina. 23. The kind of generalized fear and distrust generated by this kind of intelligence work is captured by Hany Abu-Assad’s film Omar (2013). 24. As noted elsewhere in this book (see especially the introduction and chap. 6), the government had passed its first Resolution in favor of granting citizenship to children of foreign workers (and their families) in June 2005. The rumor was that any child who did not qualify, which included almost all Latino children, would then qualify for deportation (along with their families). Since the Ministry never publicly or officially declared who was being protected from deportation while the campaign was on, rumors were constantly generated about the possibility of the temporary immunity finally coming to an end. 25. On the history of the term “self-deportation” in right-wing American politics, see Dick (2012). 26. Nurit Wargaft, “Everyday more people disappear” [in Hebrew], Haaretz, April 20, 2003. http://www.hotline.org.il/hebrew/news/2003/Haaretz042003.htm. 27. Frequent stories in the press and among Latinos told of the police knocking down doors in order to try and capture everyone before they escaped through a window. Many apartments are equipped with high-security steel doors, which are probably not easy to fell. 28. All proposals for granting citizenship to the children of noncitizen labor migrants included some residency requirement. More conservative proposals insisted on children who had lived in Israel at least ten years, while more liberal ones set the bar at five years. 29. Barak Kalir (2010, 18–20) notes how difficult it was for him to begin fieldwork, in part because of the fear of sapos.

160  |  Latinos in Israel 30. NGO advocates had two explanations for why men were more likely to be deported than women early on. First, there were simply less jail spaces to hold women prior to deportation. Second, apparently the Immigration Authority believed that if they arrested fathers, then the rest of the family would follow. On the shifting strategies of deportation, see Kemp (2007, 675–77). 31. To be more precise, it is the state which is the parasite, a condition of communication among Latinos. 32. See Hilary Dick’s (2018) work on the “call and response” of interpellation. 33. The Ministry of Interior did this when it established a special office to receive the applications. The three organizations they contacted were the Hotline for Migrant Workers; Mesila, a municipal social work agency working in south Tel Aviv with labor migrants; and a private company known by the name of its owner, Bambili, which at the time had extensive contacts among English-speaking labor migrants. 34. In an immigration interview before he was deported, Daniel explained that he had run a successful company installing electricity in rural and jungle regions. Like other creyentes (believers), Daniel told his story of immigration in the genre of witnessing; for example, he related his decision to come to Israel as spontaneous and falling into place at the last moment. These kinds of chronotopic techniques were used by creyentes to suggest that it is God’s plan that was falling into place. 35. Readers of the manuscript for this book wondered if it could be true that Daniel worked for the prime minister and other elites. I cannot verify it, but as I discussed in chapter 1, this was not unusual. Latinos often worked in the houses of elite Israelis and became important staff. I visited Latinos in the houses of their employers, including leading bankers and industrialists, so I have no reason to doubt Daniel. Interestingly, Daniel also believed that his knowledge of Hebrew helped him stave off deportation.

6 Becoming Israeli Citizens Latino Youth, Uncanny Similarity, and the Message of Citizenship

I

n November 2005, George, a noncitizen sixteen-year-old who had been born in Colombia but had lived nine years in Tel Aviv, addressed the High Court of Justice in Jerusalem. His short speech was part of a hearing for a legal petition prepared by the most prominent and oldest Israeli legal NGO, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI).1 Two months earlier, another deadline had supposedly expired, and youth like George, along with their families, were supposed to lose their temporary immunity from deportation. Although it was not clear how quickly the Immigration Authority might proceed with the deportation of such families, the hearing was part of a legal effort to prevent it as well as to move forward the campaign for their citizenship. The effort was spearheaded by ACRI and the Hotline for Migrant Workers (moked siyu’a le’ovdim zarim), but also included many other organizations who advocated for the rights of the children of unauthorized immigrants.2 In June 2005, the government had passed a resolution to grant citizenship to the children of labor migrants, which the minister responsible claimed would cover 2500 children and their families. However, due to the very restrictive criteria used most noncitizen labor migrant kids, like George, did not qualify.3 Rumors swirled throughout the summer that the Ministry of Interior would set deadlines for families who did not qualify to leave the country voluntarily. After that, according to the rumors, the Immigration Authority would begin to arrest and deport the families. George gave his, by that point, well-practiced message before the court. He spoke briefly and in a low voice, admitting later that he was nervous. However, the communicative circuits by which his utterance disseminated did not end with the courtroom walls, nor were they intended to—a whole media world was involved. The next day, his message was published as part of a front page story in the liberal Israeli Haaretz broadsheet, along with his photo, and he was quoted indirectly as well as directly: He [George] wants to finish school with complete matriculation exams, serve in the army and later continue to study at university. “We [children of labor migrants] only do good things for the state, we want to make an effort, so they see that we contribute, we don’t do any harm to anybody,” he said.”4

162  |  Latinos in Israel George added that he feels that Israel is his home, and he doesn’t remember Colombia. Of equal importance to the sentiments George expressed was that he spoke them in fluent Israeli Hebrew. George sounded exactly like what he was supposed to be: an Israeli teenager. Indeed, the slogan of the campaign was “Israeli for all intents and purposes” (yisra’eli lekol dvar ve’inyan). George, the message was meant to convey, is essentially a member of the Israeli nation, and thus the government should correct his lack of recognized, formal citizenship. This message was very effective, but not only because George sounded like who he is. Without the amplification and dissemination of mass media the political message of the campaign would not have reached politicians and a broader Israeli public. Without, that is, the mediatization—the distribution of message through commodity-forms in ways that enable large-scale communicative processes (Agha 2011a, 2011b)—of the voice of children like George, these youth would not have entered the political consensus of what can count as Israeli. Most studies of citizenship spend little time considering the relation between citizenship and mediatization. There is nothing peripheral about this relation. As Lempert and Silverstein (2012, 32) argue about US presidential politics, the mediatization of political message currently comprises the “the central, mediating fact of political process.” Although this Israeli campaign for citizenship did not involve the complex media industry surrounding American presidential politics, advocates understood from the beginning that getting youth like George to appear before journalists and other media professionals would force the government’s hand.5 Legal arguments, like those in the High Court petition, were helpful, but ultimately they were geared toward generating another opportunity for the campaign’s message. No law prevented the deportation of kids like George. Yet appearances like that of George at the High Court and the ensuing coverage made it impossible to deport them, at least until policies changed in 2011 and made deportation of younger children more possible. Considering how the campaign’s message was prepared for its mediatization is central to understanding the politics of Israeli citizenship. This chapter does just that: it considers how the campaign’s political message was forged during the crucial year between June 2005 and June 2006—between the passage of two Resolutions by the Israeli government granting a pathway to citizenship for the children of unauthorized immigrants. This period saw Latino youth play a preeminent role in advocating for citizenship for the children of unauthorized immigrants. The second, 2006 Resolution “amended” the first one, expanded the criteria, and qualified most of the Latino families with children (as well as families of other regional backgrounds).6 This political message has a longer genealogy (partially covered in Paz 2016), but advocacy organizations entered into a particularly high-tempo period of advocating for labor migrant

Becoming Israeli Citizens  |  163 youth after the first Resolution, mostly due to the rumors that the immunity from deportation might end. The campaign was a crucial moment in the cultural politics of Israeli citizenship, leading to the formalization of a concept of “cultural exile” as one way to distinguish between noncitizen labor migrant children and noncitizen Palestinian children. By seeking the formal recognition of children and youth like George, the campaign sought to produce an exception to the exclusion of foreign workers as citizens of Israel. Such efforts, often led by NGOs, are always given to great contingency (Ong 2006). In this case, the campaign successfully created a new status in Israel’s citizenship regime: non-Jewish children of labor migrants, and their immediate families, gained a path to citizenship. In discussing the campaign’s political message and its mediatization, I will make several related arguments. First, the campaign involved a politics of recognition. However, instead of a recognition of cultural difference, as in countries with multiculturalism policies, the campaign sought a recognition of cultural similarity. In inhabiting Israeli publicness, George’s unexpected and uncanny similarity to paradigmatic Israeli teenagers was at issue. Not at issue was recognizing the facts that he spoke Spanish with his mother and aunts at home, nor that he sewed a Colombian flag onto his Scouts uniform, next to the Israeli one. At the same time, his similarity to Israeli youth signaled his difference from the paradigmatic national enemy, Palestinian youth, in the context of the Second Intifada and the rightward swing in the Israeli political consensus. Second, the cultural differences of children of unauthorized immigrants were mitigated by the fact they spoke Hebrew. That is, the campaign often generated “assemblages of diversity” (Shankar 2015), but ones where Hebrew-speaking ability delimited the range of possible differences that could still count as Israeli. Third, the mediatized message of the campaign rested on a vital contrast in voices (in Bakhtin’s sense): the immediacy, innocence, and authenticity of the youthful voice of George and others was juxtaposed to the more distant, liberal, and rational voice of the advocacy organizations. Here the campaign had greater stakes than just the recognition of the children of unauthorized immigrants: the advocacy NGOs were (and are) locked into a longer-term political battle with ethnonational political groups over the terms of inclusion in the Israeli polity. In a sense, as at the High Court of Justice, the advocacy NGOs were quoting (so to speak) youth like George to produce a public voicing that could challenge the Israeli right. All of these aspects were tied together by the political message of the campaign. I will begin by positioning George’s appearance to the High Court as part of a larger media strategy in the wake of the disappointing 2005 government Resolution. I then discuss the unexpected form of the politics of recognition found in the campaign for citizenship, where the uncanny similarity of youth like

164  |  Latinos in Israel George was silently—and not so silently—contrasted with the radical alterity of Palestinian youth. Finally, I discuss how the campaign struggled to place stories about the children of unauthorized immigrants as journalistic interest wavered, and also how advocates evaluated the differing strengths of representative youth as they sought to place them in media interviews. Youth like George themselves struggled with the stress of going public, when they could simply pass as Israelis.

Voicing of the Message George’s message both before the High Court and through the subsequent media coverage functioned in multiple ways to signal his suitability for citizenship. First of all, George mentions a life course that is considered typical of middle-class Israelis: finish high school, serve in the military, and then study at university. The desire to serve, like Noga from the introduction (and further below), is especially important. George shows his loyalty to the Israeli state.7 George (and the reporter quoting him) makes this loyalty clear when he states that labor migrant kids want to contribute to the state. Indeed, George often appeared in his Scouts uniform during appearances for the campaign (see figure 6.2 and the discussion below). The khaki uniforms worn by the Scouts became an emblem of this loyalty, as well as an emblem of an initiation into uniformed public service. Haaretz also quoted George on how he contributes to the state by being a scout: “so that kids won’t just be wandering around the streets, and they will have something to do.” Here he echoes the state authorities and Latinos who worried about youth activities that attract the police, worries that led to the establishment of La Escuelita and the Eitan Scout Troop (see chap. 3). As George expresses his willingness to serve, he also brings up an implicit contrast with those who do not, as part of a response to many critics of the campaign. Those who do not serve include Jewish Israelis who refuse or find ways to be excused (Weiss 2014), but the contrast is especially to Palestinian citizens of various backgrounds. (Although some Palestinian citizens do serve in the military, the prevailing Jewish-Israeli view is that Palestinians do not.)8 When George states that noncitizen labor migrants “don’t do any harm to anybody,” he equally invokes the contrast to various others, especially the racialized Palestinians as a people who are often depicted as hating Israelis. The contrast to Palestinians, especially noncitizens, was constantly invoked in the campaign, mostly implicitly. Throughout the campaign, opponents of granting recognition to the children of non-Jewish unauthorized immigrants brought up the possibility of noncitizen Palestinians using this case as a precedent. These opponents used this possibility to push back against the political embrace of children like George. A second major aspect of how George’s message was constituted involved the relatively unadorned register that he used, which among other things signals the ritualized “innocence” of children.9 Advocates emphasized that the children of

Becoming Israeli Citizens  |  165 labor migrants could not be held responsible for their parents’ decision to migrate to Israel. During the court hearing, George made his statement in fluent Hebrew, and in his most formal register, but he certainly did not use the highly specialized register of law. (Another, older noncitizen from Hong Kong was also there to speak to the justices; he was already studying at Tel Aviv University and he spoke more eloquently than George.)10 However, most of the time the NGO lawyers and the state attorney argued their respective legal positions and answered questions from the justices.11 To get a sense of the formal and legalistic voice of the advocacy organizations, I will quote from ACRI’s press release when it submitted the petition. I try to convey some of the formality through word choice in English, although many morphosyntactic features in the Hebrew wording are also typical of this register and contrast with George’s register:12 [ACRI’s lawyer] explains in the petition that the requirement [criterion] of birth in the country, along with the requirement of the manner of entry of the parents into the country, does not fulfill the purpose of the agreement that the government has determined. [. . .] The policy of the government on this issue contravenes also the values of the State of Israel as a Jewish democratic state, which respects human rights and which takes seriously humanitarian factors as well as the commitment to respect strangers [gerim] who live here and to care for their welfare.13

The first sentence here explains on what grounds the petition was challenging the government’s 2005 Resolution, while the second is an example of how the advocates’ framing voice makes appeals to universalist formulations of liberalism (e.g., “democratic,” “human rights,” “humanitarian factors”) as well as to Jewish tradition (e.g., “Jewish state,” “strangers”). The reference to the concept of ger, “stranger,” invokes the many biblical injunctions (e.g., Exodus 22:21 and Deuteronomy 10:19) to love the stranger (ger) living within and to remember that Israelites also once lived as strangers in (ancient) Egypt—injunctions which are repeated during the Passover seder.14 That is, the advocate’s voice frames the child’s voice with a formal register, and also invokes the foundational texts of democratic and Jewish traditions. The appeals to such foundational texts were part of a larger struggle to define the Israeli polity in the public sphere. For advocates like those at ACRI and the Hotline, recognizing noncitizen children was part of a larger liberal project of bringing a more rational “immigration policy” (medinyut hagira) to the Israeli state. “Immigration policy” denotes the policy for dealing with non-Jewish immigration, like guest workers, as well as Palestinian citizenship issues such as family reunification. One of the ironies of the citizenship campaign was that it forced a public debate about immigration policy for a state that is defined by politicians and bureaucrats as a “state of return” (medinat shvut) rather than a “state of immigration” (medinat hagira), like the US, Canada, or Australia.15

166  |  Latinos in Israel George’s plain speech was the key to his role at court. The way George spoke contrasted heavily with the highly formal discourse of the lawyers and judges. This contrast was essential: the highly formal legal discourse framed George’s speech, but was kept separate.16 This separation was (and is) essential to how George’s speech could come across as innocent, that of a child and not of an adult, and therefore not responsible for his own arrival in Israel. Further, this voice came across as authentic, one that sounded like all those other Israeli children in the space and time of the nation (see Cavanaugh and Shankar 2014; also Handman 2007)—an Israeli in all but citizenship. Both innocence and national authenticity were a vital part of the political messaging used during the campaign for citizenship. The child’s voice comes across as authentic, immediate, and intimate—asking only for recognition of her or his plight. The advocate’s framing voice comes across as relatively distant, rational, and universal—seeking what is just in the formal terms of legal institutions. George was not simply addressing the court: his words were meant for, and crucially amplified through, the institutions of news media to the broader public. Advocates and representative children understood the infrastructure of mass media to permit the transmission of George’s authentic voice in ways that would make the mediation imperceptible (see Eisenlohr 2011; Weidman 2010). In an example of the importance of immediacy to political messaging (Mazzarella 2006; Allen 2009), the child’s voice was supposed to exist independently from the complex communicative process that made the message available to a mass audience. The child’s mediatized voices supposedly existed independently also of the work done by advocates to make it available and to frame it. This separation of voices ultimately weakened the liberal advocates more radical criticisms of Israel’s immigration policy. These voicing relations appeared throughout the campaign for citizenship: representative children would speak to journalists or current affairs programs, often accompanied by an experienced advocate from one of the NGOs, or in some cases the journalist acted in the role of the liberal advocate. During these events, (metapragmatic) commentary often accompanied the child’s speaking: advocates or journalists would almost always draw attention to the fluent Hebrew of the youth, and also note that it was the same as any other Israeli teenager or child. This fluent Hebrew, along with references to popular culture, were taken as the quintessential sign that the representative child was in fact an Israeli—in all but citizenship. For these reasons, all the advocate organizations emphasized that it was the media coverage, and not the merits of legal petitions, that ultimately made the campaign successful. Moving the campaign along then required media coverage. Both ACRI and the Hotline for Migrant Workers employed media coordinators, and the Hotline in particular was constantly trying to place stories about labor migrant kids. Other organizations that helped to organize advocacy also did media outreach

Becoming Israeli Citizens  |  167 in more informal ways, including Campus Bialik-Rogozin School in south Tel Aviv, the Israeli Scouts, and La Escuelita (all of which had a high proportion of unauthorized immigrant kids). Administrators in these organizations also had close connections to political elites. For example, the principal of Campus BialikRogozin School, appointed in the summer of 2005, knew the wife of then Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Aliza Olmert, and invited her to be part of a board that was looking into possible solutions for the children of unauthorized immigrants.17 Such connections clearly helped keep the campaign in front of policy makers, which helped generate interest among reporters. Yet that interest was not always sustained, and advocates had to work hard to get their message out.

Generating a Storyline Advocates did manage to generate news coverage of the trip to the High Court in Jerusalem, which involved a large contingent of high school students, scouts, and labor migrant families. Yet advocates did not always find it easy to prod journalists and other media professionals into covering the plight of labor migrant children. Most of the drama and urgency came from the narrative that such Hebrewspeaking children faced deportation. Particularly moving for reporters would be the image of a child being arrested or jailed just as they plead for the opportunity to serve their state, all in fluent Hebrew. This was an image that politicians clearly wished to avoid. Here, I will look at how advocates arranged the trip in order to generate sympathetic coverage. The trip to the High Court offered the perfect opportunity to produce news media coverage, but only the usual news outlets covered it. In particular, advocates sought (and got) a storyline about how these teenagers really are Israelis and that they acted like citizens by demanding their rights. That storyline was exactly the lead the next day in the front page (below the fold) story in Haaretz, which included a teaser above the headline, in red letters, that read “tens of children of foreign workers participated in a hearing about their petition to receive residence status.”18 The extensive preparations of advocates as well as the mediating role of the reporters fade out of the story: the newspaper story focuses on the youth as the agents of their own destiny, quoting three of them extensively. This storyline was present also in the Jerusalem Post article, as well as the Channel 1 evening newscast that day. The Jerusalem Post article even used scare quotes around the word “foreign” in its headline: “‘Foreign’ children fight deportation. Civil rights, migrant workers groups petition Supreme Court.”19 The scare quotes challenge the very assumption that these children are foreign. The message delivered through these reports was exactly as advocates hoped. Advocates were happy with the coverage of these three outlets but, as always during the campaign, the media-savvy Hotline hoped to lure more mainstream coverage. Haaretz is considered the newspaper of Ashkenazi middle-class liberals,

168  |  Latinos in Israel and Channel 1’s viewership ratings in 2005 were middling at best. The Jerusalem Post at the time was only read by Anglophones. These outlets felt to advocates like “preaching to the choir,” since Haaretz and Channel 1 regularly covered the plight of noncitizens sympathetically. On the other hand, for the trip to the High Court in Jerusalem, the Hotline’s media coordinator got interest from Channel 2 news, with its highest-rated newscast. She mentioned that a new reporter was thinking about doing stories on foreign workers, a topic that had not been previously covered by the channel. Ultimately, however, Channel 2 lost interest and canceled. A second aspect of generating the message was filling the courtroom. George was not the only youthful face at the High Court. The courtroom was filled with mostly high school students from Campus Bialik-Rogozin, the multiethnic south Tel Aviv school near the central bus station, which George and some fifty other noncitizen teenagers attended.20 A minibus full of supportive Scouts also arrived. Many of the students attending the court were, like George, undocumented residents of Israel and could potentially face deportation. Others were citizens who wanted to support their classmates, or who happily joined at the last minute for the day’s events. A third and final aspect of generating a media story about the trip to Jerusalem was instructing the students. For the school, the trip was a chance for the students—citizen and noncitizen alike—to receive some instruction in the public performance of citizenship. In particular, a “gap” (Warner 2002b, 60) was produced between their usual routine and the trip, a gap that signaled to them and to others that they had entered the public world of the Israeli nation. For example, advocates asked me to phone the parents of Latino youth to remind them to dress properly for the occasion and to arrive on time. The students met at seven in the morning, far earlier than usual, for the bus ride to Jerusalem. During the bus ride to Jerusalem, an advocate from the Hotline spoke briefly about the petition that would be discussed, and what to expect. All of these acts helped mark the gap between ordinary communication and communication to a public. The gap between attending the High Court and their normal routine was also emphasized by Campus Bialik-Rogozin’s stern new principal. She talked to the students at length about the etiquette of participating in national institutions. The principal made several specific points. First, she explained the goal of the trip for the citizen students: to show solidarity with those who grew up and feel part of the state. Second, she discussed the etiquette of the national public space, comparing the High Court to holy buildings like a mosque, a church, or a synagogue, and emphasizing that although the court is not a religious site, it needs to be treated with respect. Ironically, given the principal’s attention to formality, part of what made the teenagers’ display of publicness compelling is their unpolished demeanor, dress, and linguistic register. The kids were aware of their public participation, but they did not inhabit the professionalized demeanor of the lawyers, the principal, and other advocates who accompanied them.

Becoming Israeli Citizens  |  169

Figure 6.1 Photo of Campus Rogozin-Bialik pupils and advocates sitting in the courtroom of the Israeli Supreme Court. The photo appeared the next day as part of a front-page story about the trip to Jerusalem. Tamara Traubman, “Wong requested a student visa and received a deportation order: ‘they are exiling us’” [in Hebrew], Haaretz, November 28, 2005, pp. A1 & A8. Photo credit: Tomer Appelbaum. COPYRIGHT© “HA’ARETZ” DAILY NEWSPAPER LTD. Reprinted with permission.

The principal also made a third point in her remarks on the bus, one that directs attention to the limits of Israeli multicultural ideologies of inclusion, and to the assemblages of diversity that were generated by the campaign. She stated that at Campus Bialik-Rogozin there is no discrimination against Muslim, Christian, or Jew. This statement was meant to suggest to the students how they might think about the possibility of non-Jews gaining citizenship in Israel. The statement also resonated with highly localized expressions of multicultural participation that were typical of the Tel Aviv municipal government (Kemp and Raijman 2004): all are included, within the limits of Zionist liberalism. The idea of such inclusion appeared in several news articles that covered the campaign for citizenship, and some that predated the campaign and emphasized the multicultural context of south Tel Aviv.21 This idea of multiculturalism was also suggested by the other photo published in the Haaretz article: diverse-looking bodies seated in the courtroom, with directly quoted speech in the caption: “Children of foreign workers during a hearing of the Supreme Court in Jerusalem. ‘This is our final chance,’ said the children” (see figure 6.1).22 The photo produces a message as part of what Shalini Shankar (esp. 2015, 11–17, 193–222) calls an “assemblage of diversity,” by which she points to the contingency of the elements that come

170  |  Latinos in Israel together to project an image that emphasizes racial difference, often against a background of what is considered normal. What united these diverse-looking bodies was George’s statement, spoken to the court in Hebrew. Part of the message of such images, within the campaign, was: these children do not pose a threat, demographic or otherwise—they are Israeli kids like your own. The photo represents racialized bodies that many Israelis could regard as foreign. However, the children’s foreign appearance was mitigated by their use of Hebrew in a native-sounding voice, which simultaneously suggested how these youth fit within the limits of Israeli national notions of difference. The political message of the campaign defined the limits of acceptable difference: who could count as sufficiently similar to be recognized as Israeli, and therefore deserving of citizenship.

Uncanny Similarity and the Politics of Recognition The demographic demon—the idea of undermining the demographic majority of Jewish citizens in Israel—haunted the campaign. Within the cultural politics of mediatized message, kids like George and his mates could come off as Israeli. But a counter-message was prepared by opponents of the campaign that warned that the dissimilarity of labor migrant kids—the fact that they are not Jewish—would bring about a loss of national identity. To accentuate this message, opponents insinuated that granting citizenship to such kids would provide a legal precedent for extending citizenship to noncitizen Palestinian children—something that has not come to pass. In the period after the Second Intifada, government policy was geared to limiting the number of noncitizen Palestinians who could claim Israeli citizenship. The possibility for producing a precedent for more claims therefore could stall the campaign. As Sarah Willen (2015, 78) notes, “children of unauthorized and irregular migrants have frequently become a lightning rod for political emotions—including, in particular, demographic anxiety.” To successfully gain recognition for labor migrant children, the campaign had to produce a sense of difference from Palestinians as much as similarity to Israelis. These messages of similarity to (or difference from) Israelis and Palestinians— and the demographic anxieties they aroused—played out throughout the campaign. Indeed, the campaign in essence involved a distinct form of the politics of recognition: rather than a politics of recognizing the cultural differences of labor migrant kids, here was a politics of recognizing labor migrant kids as (sufficiently) similar to Israelis, notably in the context of not recognizing the ever more distanced, and therefore ever more incommensurable, Palestinians. This context cannot be ignored: the graduated sovereignty (Ong 1999, 21–24; 2006, 75–96) across the territories controlled by the Israeli state, and across the populations subjected to it, helped to produce a citizenship regime with “gradations of rights”

Becoming Israeli Citizens  |  171 (Holston 2008, 7), where Palestinians with distinct statuses (citizen, noncitizen, permit-holders, among others) were in particular targeted for differentiation. The politics of recognition ultimately involves the mediatization of similarity and difference as publicness. Liberal philosopher Charles Taylor (1994) famously described the politics of recognition in terms of Enlightenment theories about how cultural difference can be reciprocally acknowledged by equals (citizens) in public. Taylor criticized most contemporary forms of multicultural recognition, arguing that sameness is being produced under the guise of respecting difference. Elizabeth Povinelli (2002) goes further, arguing that the “cunning” of liberal forms of multicultural recognition is found in how cultural difference, like the alterity of indigenous groups in Australia, is apprehended within the limits of public reason.23 A rightward turn in the Israeli political consensus saw the shifting limits of public acceptance, just as the liberal promises of the Oslo period gave way to more virulently ethnonational forms of exclusion. The Oslo period, critics argue, was an attempt by Israeli leaders, with the encouragement of US policy makers, to shift the political economic trajectory of Jewish Israel in the 1990s: rather than territorial expansion, economic growth was to be fueled through finding new markets, gaining greater global recognition for Israel, as well as neoliberal privatization and curtailing of the welfare state (Hever 2010; Shafir and Peled 2000, 2002; Shalev 1997; Stein 2008).24 Accompanied by liberal rhetoric and the rise of a business elite, these policies and recognition bore fruit for the Israeli economy.25 Simultaneously, processes were implemented to create greater separation between Jewish citizens and noncitizen Palestinians, including a heavy militarization of the boundaries around Palestinian urban centers and a formalization of noncitizen Palestinian day workers through an extensive permit regime (Berda 2012; Gordon 2008). These processes also resulted in a steep reduction in aggregate income levels for noncitizen Palestinians (Farsakh 2002). If the Oslo period saw openings to liberal policy, the 2000s largely saw an end to such liberal directions, as part of a shift to the right in the Israeli political consensus. Several events mark the end of the Oslo period, even as other processes continued. First, as the Oslo process stalled, the Second Palestinian Intifada (or “uprising”) began in the occupied territories against the new conditions of occupation (Hammami and Tamari 2001). This sustained uprising had an enormous impact on citizenship. Organizations of Palestinian citizens increasingly criticized the colonial history that lay at the foundations of the State of Israel, and they demonstrated in support of the Intifada—leading to renewed direct repression by the Israeli police (Rouhana and Sabbagh-Khoury 2014).26 Also, at the same time that the campaign for citizenship of noncitizen labor migrants was taking off, new government resolutions were extended to make family reunification between Palestinian citizens and noncitizens much more difficult

172  |  Latinos in Israel (Kemp 2007; Rouhana and Sultany 2003). This shift to the right also involved a more strident public rhetoric of exclusion, which Adi Kuntsman and Rebecca Stein (2015, 10) have summarized: even as the occupation was receding from political discourse, Jewish Israelis were progressively embracing a politics of militant patriotism. Racist anti-Palestinian sentiment once relegated to Israeli right-wing margins moved to the center of mainstream political discourse, the evolution of a set of rightward shifts that began in 2000, growing in force and magnitude during the periodic military assaults on Gaza.

In short, a political atmosphere had emerged that threatened Palestinians, especially noncitizen Palestinians, using an illiberal rhetoric of exclusion.27 Public reason was shifting and impacting the differentiated citizenship regime across Israel/Palestine. However, during the very period when policy makers were reinstitutionalizing the exclusion of Palestinians from citizenship, the campaign for citizenship for the children of labor migrants took off. Until 2011 and to a certain extent after, governing politicians found it next to impossible to order the deportation of kids like George that speak Hebrew like Israeli children.28 Time and again, between the founding of the Immigration Police in 2002 and 2011, the long-rumored start of deportation of labor migrant children and their families was postponed. This long moratorium, finally ending in 2011, essentially granted labor migrant children and their families an exceptional status (not unlike what occurred in the United States under the Obama administration in 2012; Reynolds and Chun 2013, 474). Further, as Nelly Kfir and Adriana Kemp (2016, 887–88) note, the reluctance to deport children had little to do with electoral outcomes but rather was a consensus that formed among ruling politicians. The consensus saw politicians essentially agreeing that labor migrant children are Israeli, and that a bureaucratic procedure to officially recognize them was necessary. Although not complete—the large religious Mizrahi party shas in particular dissented—this consensus was maintained through the terms of rightwing Prime Ministers Ariel Sharon (2001–2006), Ehud Olmert (2006–2009), and Binyamin Netanyahu (2009 through the time of this writing). Moreover, these three prime ministers all passed Resolutions in favor of granting and expanding citizenship to the children of unauthorized immigrants. How can we explain the relation between the re-inscription of Palestinian alterity (especially that of noncitizens), part of a rising tide of militant patriotism, and the fact that Israeli governments recognized the children of unauthorized immigrants as Israeli and provided them the means to become Israeli citizens? The answer lies in how the political message of the campaign was received, and in particular, the reaction to hearing kids like George address the nation in Hebrew and promise to dedicate themselves to the state. Through the mediatization of

Becoming Israeli Citizens  |  173 these children’s voices, Israeli public opinion found them to be, to coin a phrase, uncannily similar: the recognition of their similarity mirrored what the Israeli political consensus took to be the unrecognizable, radical alterity of the nation’s enemy, the Palestinians.29 The recognition involved the boundaries of political community, which could not include Palestinians, even for sympathetic Jewish Israelis on the radical left (see F. Wright 2016, 138–39). Children like George represented the nation to itself, without the Palestinians, and their authenticity as Israelis belied their (non)citizenship status. The uncanny similarity of youth like George emerged from the political message promoted during the campaign, and in particular from the use of Hebrew. For example, in a later and larger iteration of the campaign, the (ceremonial) Israeli president, Shimon Peres, advocated recognition of labor migrant children by drawing on several traditions. In 2009, he addressed a letter to then Minister of Interior Eli Yishai, who was the leader of the ultra-orthodox Mizrahi Shas party. Although occasionally employing softer rhetoric, Yishai had been a virulent opponent to granting citizenship to noncitizen children of unauthorized immigrants. After the passage of the 2006 government Resolution, for example, Yishai stated that “It’s not a humanitarian matter. . . . The resolution is an explosives belt for [our] image, society, economy, and Judaism, and we are on a slippery slope whose end is the loss of identity.”30 The term “explosives belt” is a reference to Palestinian suicide attacks—Yishai thus makes a not very subtle parallel between such attacks and the demographic demon of granting citizenship to non-Jews. In addressing Yishai three years later, Peres used a tried and true rhetoric to appeal for a Resolution in favor of citizenship, invoking Zionist narratives of Jewish diaspora, Torah injunctions about the proper treatment of strangers (ger, from Leviticus 24:22), and his own experience visiting with the children at an Israeli school in Tel Aviv.31 As Peres put it, his visit to the school led him to discover an Israeli essence, which he described after historical and Torah references, with a literary style: I sensed in them the flavor of Israel in which they were born, I heard Hebrew that rings without a false note from their mouths, I felt their deep tie to and love for Israel and their desire to live in its lands, to serve in its army, and to contribute to its strengthening.32

Peres’s letter gives a good (if flowery) example of how mainstream Israeli politicians interpreted labor migrant children speaking in Hebrew. Prime Ministers Sharon, Olmert, and, to a lesser extent, Netanyahu all ended up being swayed.33 Probably nothing signals the uncanny similarity of these subjects—and the alterity of Palestinians—more than the term “cultural exile” (haglaya tarbutit). This term was used by advocates to describe the harsh effects deportation would have on labor migrant children. The term was linked to related terms used in early

174  |  Latinos in Israel legal petitions by ACRI, like “assimilation” (hishtalvut or hitarvut beyisra’el), which sought to emphasize how children of labor migrants were culturally adapted to (Jewish-)Israeli society. In those petitions, the assimilation was measured out in documentable facts of childhood: speaking Hebrew, studying at Israeli schools, participating in Israeli youth activities (like the Scouts) or youth culture (like following pop groups), hanging out with Israeli friends, and intending to serve in the Israeli military. In its first 2002 legal petition for such children, and then again in its 2005 petition, ACRI sought to prove this assimilation with documents like report cards, photos, and the like. However, for policy makers, this positive assimilation was not sufficient, because the question remained whether a juridical distinction could be made between the children of labor migrants and the children of noncitizen Palestinians. Indeed, an early proposal for granting citizenship to labor migrant kids was undermined in summer 2004 by a legal opinion, written by a senior state attorney for the Ministry of Justice, Yochi Genessin, in which she stated that it was not possible to legally discriminate between noncitizen children of labor migrants and those of Palestinians.34 It was in that context that the term “cultural exile” was coined, probably by the Minister of Interior from the secular, liberal shinu’i party, which formed part of the government in 2003.35 Shinu’i’s support for the cause of labor migrant children was part of a broader “civic revolution” against the religious parties’ control over eligibility for citizenship and personal law (Kemp 2007, 677–79). The term was specifically formulated to distinguish between the two types of noncitizens, labor migrant children and Palestinian or other Arab children. The Minister of Interior, Avram Poraz, argued that there was a difference between deporting the children of labor migrants and Palestinian children: If the state of Israel deports foreign workers’ children who were born here or lived here most of their lives, who speak Hebrew, who study in the Israeli school system, and whose friends are Israeli, it will thus cause cultural exile. This isn’t the same as a Palestinian child, who for example was born in Nablus [in the occupied West Bank] and today lives in Umm el-Fahm [within the Green Line].36 Even if that child returns to live in the territories, we’re still speaking about the same Arab culture and the same language. But a child whose parents’ origins are say in the Philippines has no common ground with that society, thousands of kilometers away from the Israeli society in which he is integrated.37

The child of labor migrants who grew up in a Jewish-Israeli context is understood to have no other home, just like (according to Israeli nationalism) the Jews. Besides the cultural similarity attributed to these children, there is the uncanny similarity of what deportation would mean: they would not return home, they would be exiled. The use of “exile” here draws from the national narrative,

Becoming Israeli Citizens  |  175 according to which the Jews suffered multiple exiles from their homeland and only returning to the Land of Israel can redeem this diasporic condition. Picking up on a long tradition of understanding Israeli children as born of the nation rather than of their parents’ past (Zerubavel 1995, 26–31), here is the meaning of George’s statement above that he does not remember Colombia. His exile would be similar to that of the Jews of the past if he were deported. On the other hand, in the eyes of Poraz and other policy makers, noncitizen Palestinian children remain completely unassimilated and their alterity cannot be resolved. According to the Israeli political consensus, Palestinian history of exile cannot enter into the national narrative. Implicit in Poraz’s statement is the idea that Palestinians will never exhibit the Israeli culture of which speaking Hebrew is the quintessential sign. On the contrary, Poraz implied that they exhibit only Arab culture, and only speak Arabic. They would not experience exile if deported, according to this thinking: noncitizen Palestinian children can only represent a demographic threat. In essence, the term “cultural exile” helped to prop up the arguments of one side of the debate about extending citizenship to the children of unauthorized immigrants. The importance of the term was exhibited by the fact that the 2005 Resolution actually mentions “cultural exile” as part of determining which children are eligible: “the child studies in a school in Israel or finished his studies as noted, speaks the Hebrew language, and his expected removal from Israel would involve a ‘cultural exile’ to a state to which he has no cultural tie” (see Resolution 3807 from June 2005). The later two Resolutions no longer mentioned cultural exile explicitly, but the idea remained in two separate clauses that used more bureaucratically tractable criteria: speaking Hebrew and studying in a school in Israel. In essence, the term “cultural exile” came to be measured in terms of Hebrew and attendance at a Jewish-Israeli school. Opponents of the Resolutions emphasized that these children could not be distinguished from noncitizen Palestinians. Throughout the campaign, opponents to granting citizenship to noncitizen children of labor migrants, like Yochi Genessin and bureaucrats in the Ministry of the Interior, would constantly deny the distinction between the two groups of noncitizens in order to suggest that any granting of citizenship would open the door to more Palestinian claims to citizenship. Often, this would involve particularly elevated estimates of the number of children who would qualify for citizenship, a “politics of numbers” (Kemp 2007, 680–83) that NGO advocates suspected included Palestinian noncitizen children with the noncitizen children of labor migrants.38 From the point of view of advocates, the campaign was successful, since hundreds of labor migrant children came to be recognized as citizens. Yet one goal was not reached. In Peres’s letter, or even in Poraz’s idea of cultural exile, the only voice that matters is that of the Hebrew-speaking child. Nowhere does

176  |  Latinos in Israel the rational voice of the liberal NGO advocate receive attention. That is, Peres and Poraz, like other politicians, ignored the overall attempt by advocacy NGOs to continue liberal modes of policy making in the face of Israel’s rightward shift. Liberal advocates sought to advance a rational “immigration policy,” one at odds with the state-sanctioned institutions that define Jewish immigration as a return from exile. This kind of advocacy involved deploying a rhetoric of rational policy and international law in public sphere debates. Take for example a statement issued by six leading organizations including the Hotline and ACRI in August 2009 regarding non-Jewish labor migration, entitled “Principles for Arranging the Employment of Labor Migrants in Israel.”39 The statement condenses a decade of criticisms over Israeli state disregard for labor migrant rights, as well as of Israeli policies of deportation. In particular, the statement attacks the “corruption” involved in official guest worker programs, where workers are brought to Israel in exchange for enormous fees to private labor agencies, to which state organizations turn a blind eye. Another target is the infamous “binding policy” where guest workers in essence have their work visa tied to a single employer, preventing them from leaving an employer without losing their legal status (see Kemp and Raijman 2004, 33). (The High Court of Justice found the “binding policy” to be a modern form of slavery.)40 Much space is also dedicated to recommending that labor migrants be given the same rights as Israeli workers, which would make Israelis competitive in the labor market. Finally, as one of these rights, the statement articulates an idea of right to residence at odds with the idea of ethno-national belonging that is foundational of the Israeli state, and ties this idea to the campaign for citizenship. Once again, as in the ACRI press release above, the advocate’s voice is produced with a high formal register, drawing on abstract and universalist concepts of justice: To whomever the state found worthy to allow into its territory legally for an extended stay, the state cannot prevent access to residence and citizenship, as long as Israel became his domicile in practice. The contribution of a person to the economy of a state grants him the right to integrate into its civic fabric. Israel must also formalize through legislation the right to status for the children who grew up in Israel, who were absorbed into the Israeli educational system, and whose expulsion comprises a kind of cultural exile.

Such a statement is in effect a radical (liberal) rejection of the very basis of the State of Israel.41 The suggestion in this statement is that the presumptive national essence of Jewish kinship and the idea of return would not be the only criterion for granting citizenship to immigrants. A rational immigration policy, according to this perspective, should recognize that an individual’s contributions to the economy and residence create a civic attachment. In a sense, youth like George and his peers are the best exemplars of this principle: their attachment and transformation into Israelis occurred through their longtime residence. As a

Becoming Israeli Citizens  |  177 result, according to this logic, people like George deserve citizenship. Beyond the logic, the formal rhetoric of rational public speech is decidedly not meant to foster a sense of immediacy. The advocate inhabits universal justice through a distanced public sphere register. The immediacy is left for the subaltern to enact. This liberal advocacy included challenging the illiberal forms of excluding Palestinians. One NGO advocate told me of a contentious debate between lawyers and others about how to write the legal petition for the hearing in November 2005. The debate centered on how to challenge the June 2005 resolution in ways that would, in addition to helping labor migrant kids, also open up more space for Palestinian claims to citizenship. The lawyers writing the petition eventually challenged two of the criteria established by the 2005 resolution: first the requirement of birth in Israel and second the requirement that the parent had first entered the country legally (with either a tourist visa or work visa, regardless of whether that visa later expired). Challenging the latter criterion, legal entry, was meant to help the case of noncitizen Palestinian children, most of whom, it was assumed, had never lived with residence status in Israel. The NGO advocate explained that lawyers also wanted to challenge the criteria that eligible children need to speak Hebrew as well as the need to demonstrate domicile. After a long, difficult argument, the group of lawyers gave up on challenging these latter criteria. The NGO advocate told me that she put the problem to the lawyers like this: “look, you are going to sacrifice the children of foreign workers in order to be right.” By this she meant that the petition could fail by sounding like a petition for Palestinian rather than labor migrant children. This was the terrain across which liberal NGOs battled governing politicians and sought to change the institutional parameters of citizenship that went back to the early state period. The uncanny similarity of subjects like George existed as an effect of the repression of the history of exile and occupation of Palestinians. Starting very early in the campaign, prominent Israeli politicians like Poraz, Sharon, and Olmert—and later even Netanyahu—publicly recognized labor migrant children as Israelis. For politicians, the only challenge was how to find a procedure, as well as a set of criteria, that would cover the children of labor migrants and exclude any possibility of noncitizen Palestinian children from making similar claims. On the other hand, NGO advocates hoped that the immediate appeal of the public voice of children could pave the way to a more liberal immigration policy. However, the campaign occurred against the backdrop of a swing to the right in public opinion: while the uncannily similar children were recognized, the liberal immigration policy was not. The immediacy of the children’s voice was accepted as converging with the nationality displayed in dominant Israeli media worlds. The distant and rational register of NGO advocates, however, was limited in its effects on the political calculus of Israeli politicians.

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Mediatizing the Child of “Foreign Workers” Generally speaking, everyone associated with the campaign thought its success depended on the media. Which is to say, the campaign depended on the vagaries of the commodification of news, and what editors and reporters felt would attract Israeli consumers of news. As several lawyers explained to me, the legal petitions to the courts were not built on strong legal premises. Any sovereign country can decide who remains within its boundaries, and no law prevented the Israeli state from deporting noncitizen minors under the age of eighteen. Even the legal proceedings were ultimately geared to produce media coverage. Merav, the lawyer who helped to write and present the ACRI petition to the High Court, explained to me that such petitions were mostly prepared to help “arouse a public debate.” By “public debate,” she was not referring to the press release, cited above, which announced that ACRI submitted the petition to the High Court. What Merav meant was exactly how the advocates’ political message was produced through a juxtaposition of voices, advocate framing child. To understand better how ACRI got involved in the campaign, I also asked Merav what drew her to the issue of the children of labor migrants. Merav’s meaning of “public debate” became clear from her answer. She replied that ACRI lawyers pick some issues for their legal merit, and others more for their “human” merit, and that this case was of the latter kind. In reality, the development of the “human” aspect was achieved through the media coverage. In other words, although the liberal advocates who worked at NGOs like ACRI and the Hotline used an elevated register of rational policy in many public expressions, they were also savvy media promoters. Through their longtime work with journalists, they understood the need to craft a political message that could present the case of noncitizen children—and ultimately also articulate their own aims of changing Israel’s immigration policy. Their liberalism and humanitarian work was adapted to the Israeli media world of getting exposure for the cause of the children. It was crucial that youth interviewees seem authentic and sincere, but that did not mean that advocates were unaware of the best strategies to produce this message. Cultivating a political message about citizenship involved multiple strategies. These strategies were all put to use between the first government Resolution in June 2005 and the amendment that came in June 2006. The campaign took on a new urgency with the passing of the restrictive June 2005 Resolution. As noted, the criteria that were set in 2005 meant most labor migrant children would not qualify, despite claims made by the Ministry of Interior. Yet Ministry of Interior officials wanted unauthorized immigrant families to begin the process of evaluation whether their children qualified or not. That meant submitting files for each family to the Ministry with multiple documents that would make their

Becoming Israeli Citizens  |  179 whereabouts known to state apparatuses. One of the first big decisions advocates needed to make after the 2005 Resolution was whether to advise families to submit the file or not, knowing of this danger. The carrot proffered by Ministry officials was that registered families would not receive deportation orders while their case was being examined. The fact that a Resolution in favor of citizenship had been passed by the government helped propel the campaign. Statements by politicians soon helped to craft the political message. The day after his government passed the resolution, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon himself was quoted as feeling compelled to come to the aid of these uncannily similar children after having seen a news report about them: The Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon . . . said that his attitude to children of foreign workers was influenced by a television program that dealt with the children of foreigners who are members of the Scouts’ troop and are anticipating conscription. “I admit that the cry of those children left an impression on me. I came to the conclusion that it is necessary to find an arrangement to make it possible for these youth, who speak fluent Hebrew, to stay in the country,” said Sharon.42

The program about the Scouts, which Sharon had watched, included two Latinos and a Thai teenager who appeared in their Scout uniforms. The uniform, signaling the willingness to serve in the military, and speaking in fluent Hebrew made these youth uncannily similar for Sharon. Their “cry” seemed immediate: the mediation of journalists and television is obscured. Ironically, the two Latinos who appeared in the program did not qualify for citizenship with the restrictive criteria that Sharon’s government had used.43 Yet Sharon’s statement helped the campaign continue to make its case for expanding on the 2005 Resolution. In this phase of the campaign, post-June 2005, Latino youth played an especially prominent role, appearing often as representatives of the voice of labor migrant children. There are several reasons for their prominence over kids of other regional backgrounds. Latino youth were heavily involved in the Eitan Scout Troop in their neighborhood, and especially after Ariel Sharon’s pronouncement, photos of labor migrant kids in Scouts uniforms were increasingly used.44 Further, several Latino youth were in their late teens, and thus sufficiently articulate and confident to meet the demands of appearing regularly before media professionals. Finally, my own fieldwork, crisscrossing between the organizations and Latino families, had brought more Latino youth into contact with advocates. Although these kids were meant to appear as they really were, in the role of authentic Israeli kids, advocates were not leaving this to chance. A media strategy was developed, mostly ad hoc and following the early work of the Hotline. The Hotline, Rogozin High School, Eitan Scout Troop, and La Escuelita all played

180  |  Latinos in Israel significant roles in organizing events. The strategy was to have the representative youth appear as often as possible to speak with news and current affairs media, usually alongside an advocate that could make the more formal case. That is, a liberal Israeli voice was to appear beside, and frame, the voice of the representative child. Finally, all advocate organizations ended up forming something like a youth group in order to prepare the kids to appear and make their case. Many strategies involved presenting these uncannily similar youth through photography or theater, in actions that were influenced by Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.45 The youth were to appear as if speaking for themselves, directly to the Israeli public. If done right, the mediation of the advocacy organizations, journalists, and socio-technologies of mass communication was to disappear, leaving no trace on the youth’s immediate appeal. La Escuelita was among the first to start preparing, organizing a meeting between teachers and Latino kids soon after the disappointing June 2005 resolution. The meeting was well attended, including by many of the older Latino teens. Two kinds of public acts were proposed. First, the director of La Escuelita, Diego Manuel, proposed writing a letter from the kids to Ariel Sharon, explaining their situation. Earl, an older Latino, explained that a letter had already been passed from the Scouts national leadership to Sharon. Diego Manuel pointed out in response that the Scouts had failed to generate news coverage. Diego Manuel was proposing a letter to be presented in public fashion. The second proposal was the staging of a play, as a kind of a theater of the oppressed. One of the longtime volunteers of La Escuelita knew a theater director who agreed, for a fee, to help teach the teens to act, and help them put on the play. The director wanted the kids to perform about their fears of deportation, and the presence of police and other Israeli authorities in their lives. The point was to make these fears palpable for the kids and thus packaged for some future Israeli audience.46 The timeline discussed for the play was a two-month period, which would have it put on at exactly the time that the deportations might start. As the summer wore on, problems with attendance and then with the director saw the project fizzle out. The Hotline also realized the importance of organizing the youth to appear in public, especially if deportations of families were to start. An executive meeting in July discussed the possibility of starting a legal petition, and attendees analyzed the June 2005 government decision. One senior lawyer noted that two of the criteria for citizenship, legal arrival in Israel and the notion of “cultural exile,” were meant to discriminate against noncitizen Palestinian children. The group concurred that the Ministry of Interior wanted to make sure that the children who were candidates for citizenship would speak Hebrew and not Arabic. As it turned out, this analysis shaped the legal petition mentioned at the outset. Many advocates were determined to challenge the growing limitations to Palestinian rights, yet this could not be an explicit objective. Also, the Hotline’s media

Becoming Israeli Citizens  |  181 coordinator began to try and place stories about the children in news outlets, using the possibility of their imminent deportation as the hook for reporters. Here was where advocates ran into the exigencies of commodifying news. Getting the attention of journalists, especially those considered to have a more mainstream audience, was not an easy task. Journalists were especially interested in telling the story of the children at moments of heightened drama, like imminent deportation; also, more mainstream television programs or newspapers would regularly drop an interviewee if they discovered he or she had already been interviewed. Another problem for advocates was ensuring that journalists got the story straight. While having youth state their desire to remain in the country in perfect Hebrew was fairly easy, the actual facts about the government Resolutions, including the criteria to qualify for citizenship, were difficult to encapsulate for journalists. This was another reason why the Hotline preferred the framing voice of an advocate to accompany youth interviewees, to better explain this context. At the end of the summer of 2005, many media outlets were gaining interest in the story of labor migrant kids due to the rumors they would be deported. There was a rumor that September 15, 2005, was the day that children who did not qualify for the June 2005 resolution could be deported. An article came out seven days before the supposed deadline in the supplement of Israel’s then largest newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, interviewing several of the older Latinos (including George) at the Eitan Scout Troop.47 The storyline focused on how the youth continued to participate in the daily activities of the troop, even with the impending deadline looming over them. The cover of the supplement comprised a large photo of two Latino youth dressed in their Scouts’ uniform, staring directly into the camera, with the title “shevet nikxad” (“Endangered Tribe,” see figure 6.2), playing on the Hebrew word for “tribe,” shevet, which is used for Scout troops (as in shevet eitan, Eitan Troop).48 The article emphasized that participating in the troop is not only a matter of youth activities but also a matter of serving the state, that is, acting like an Israeli citizen: “The [motto] ‘Be Prepared’ of the Scouts is, for them, a reason to stay here and contribute their utmost to the state. For its part, it shoves them aside.” The reporter describes each interviewed scout in terms of identifiable Israeli attributes. One Colombian is compared to characters from a TV program: he “radiates hip Israeliness no less than the participants of ‘Exit’” (a popular afternoon youth TV program). Another Colombian is described in terms of his “assimilation” to Israeli culture, which is not limited to the “music to which he listens (Pini Hadad, Nati Levy, Moshik Afia) or the slang he speaks (‘cool,’ ‘get outta here’).” The assimilation also extends to his way of speaking, suggesting some of the chutzpah-like gumption that the reader is supposed to recognize as particularly Israeli: “as one who grew up and was educated here he recognizes the ability of the Israeli patriotic sense to crack any opposition.”

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Figure 6.2 Endangered Tribe, from Yedioth Aharonoth, 24 Sha’ot, September 8, 2005. The caption reads: “Colombia, China, Ghana—at the scout troop ‘Eitan’ it’s possible to find representatives of almost all countries, children of foreign workers. They go together to programs, they share the same terrifying dream: that tomorrow someone will knock on the door and deport them from here.” Photograph: Gilad Kavalerchik, Yedioth Aharonoth. Reprinted with permission.

Becoming Israeli Citizens  |  183 The shocking aspect of the story was the imminent deportation of these children, which the Yedioth Ahronoth article had (supposedly) just revealed. In response, many other news outlets also started to inquire. The Hotline’s media coordinator suddenly saw an upsurge in interest. It seemed that everyone wanted to interview these kids before they could be deported. Just as suddenly the interest died, however. Before the coordinator could fully place her new stories, a new rumor spread that the Minister of Interior was going to extend (once again) the temporary moratorium on deporting such children. As the media coordinator was furiously working to pin down three more news items about the imminent deportation, reporters checked with the head of the municipal social work center, Mesila, regarding the September 15 deadline. When Mesila’s director denied knowing of the deadline, all three items were canceled. Mesila’s director, being a state functionary, apparently had greater credibility than the Hotline’s media coordinator. The Hotline’s media coordinator was furious with Mesila’s director for undermining these opportunities. She suddenly could not place any stories about the children who faced deportation. The campaign for citizenship depended a great deal on the mediatizing of the political message. Advocates knew very well they needed a strong media strategy to influence public opinion. In that sense, what journalists and stringers for current affairs programs could sell to their editors and producers, and ultimately to their audiences, played a vital role in shaping that political message.

Similarity in Public or Passing in Private Advocates and media professionals were not the only agents in determining that message. The kids themselves played a role of a different kind. The Latino youth that could produce the mediatized voice of the uncannily similar child were not always comfortable doing so. Out of the public eye, many of them passed for Israelis. They considered themselves, and were generally perceived to be, Israelis. Their difference seemed like the other differences found in Israel, which can regularly be classified in ethnicized and racialized demographic groups, like Argentinean, Russian, Yemeni, Bukhari, Ethiopian, even Arab. Like these other groups, they could blend in by calling themselves “Latin Americans” and seem like just another immigrant group.49 No one need suspect they were “foreign workers.” Outside of south Tel Aviv, where there were many labor migrant families, many Latino youth simply interacted as peers with their classmates and friends, almost entirely without any awareness of their noncitizen status. Most Latino youth who were willing to appear in front of the media were from the south Tel Aviv neighborhoods, where it was more common for youth to lack citizenship. Of course, as every noncitizen youth knew, passing had its own limits: besides not receiving an identity card at sixteen, and

184  |  Latinos in Israel not moving along the life course of doing military service, they witnessed the deportations of relatives and friends, and at eighteen they became vulnerable to being deported themselves. The ability of youth to perform uncanny similarity as a political message stemmed from their regular childhood interactions, from their ability to pass. But for teenagers to appear in front of the press, especially television and radio, they needed some confidence or at least a disregard for not passing. Also, coming from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds, they were not always able to confidently interview in front of the press. Those youth living outside of south Tel Aviv, whose noncitizen status was unknown among their friends and classmates, generally feared the exposure. Others demurred being exposed even if they were well known among peers to be from noncitizen labor migrant families. This tension was constant even for those, like George, who took the plunge and agreed to regularly interview. To the great frustration of advocates, even those youth who interviewed regularly could sometimes cancel at the last minute. These tensions shaped the way that advocates tried to deploy the youth for appearances in front of the media. They shaped the very voicing relation that was established, and what kind of political message was possible. George was a very good speaker for the campaign, since he could create empathy and he was fairly reliable. When he appeared at court to speak for the noncitizen children of labor migrants, however, it was for a petition that was not written for his family. George’s family was not the best representative family to challenge the criteria established by the June 2005 resolution, even though George was a good representative to speak at court. For the petition itself, ACRI lawyers worked with another Colombian family, from Jerusalem, whose son Sandro had arrived at the age of two and had lived in Israel more than ten years (thus fulfilling the criterion of ten years, but not birth), while his younger sister had been born in Israel but was only nine (thus fulfilling the criterion of birth, but not ten years). Neither Sandro nor his younger sister qualified for citizenship according to the June 2005 Resolution, but for different reasons. Sandro could have been asked to speak at the hearing for the petition in his family’s name. However, NGO advocates considered Sandro too shy and not sufficiently articulate to speak at court. This is more than just an issue of personality. Sandro was not able to go beyond the limits established by his ability to pass. What made George a useful speaker for the campaign? While discussing an upcoming interview, the media coordinator of the Hotline compared George to other possibilities: while another teenager was voluble and knew her three-minute story perfectly and thus created empathy, George was useful because he came off as “cute” (xamud). Another NGO advocate explained that one advantage of George’s message is that he frequently said aliti la’arets, “I  immigrated [ascended] to the country,” rather than bati la’arets, “I came to the country.”

Becoming Israeli Citizens  |  185 aliti is the term exclusively used for authorized Jewish immigrants to Israel, under the Law of Return, who immediately become citizens on arrival. George’s choice of words thus epitomized the message that advocates wished him to convey: he is an Israeli, even before he is a citizen. The naïve use of aliti la’arets strengthened George’s claim to authenticity. George was not however a perfect speaker. At court he spoke quickly, in a low voice and nervously. He did not come across with the irrepressible rhetoric that some of the other youth could pull off. There were other youth that were considered to be rhetorically more compelling, especially since they could mediate the sense of irrepressible Israeli youth, full of chutzpah. xutspa (chutzpah) in Israeli Hebrew is a term for rudeness, especially when interactional directness can mean imposing on another. The term is also often used to describe behavior where directness involves disregarding social hierarchies.50 An example of the voluble and irrepressible youth emerged at the court hearing, which returns us to the anecdote with which this book began, here described in more detail. During the hearing, the state’s attorney, Yochi Genessin, caused quite a stir among the assembled advocates and teenagers. Genessin, at the time a twenty-one-year veteran of the state attorney’s office, was described in a newspaper article in the following way: “she is among the most prominent personages in shaping the severe policy of the Population and Immigration Administration, and is considered the most senior figure in this area within the attorney’s office.”51 Genessin had helped stop previous proposals for granting citizenship by bringing up the specter of noncitizen Palestinian children gaining citizenship. At the High Court, as opposed to the lawyers from the NGOs, Genessin put on a dramatic show, stern and uncompromising in her stance to the petition. Afterwards, the principal from George’s school called her “an evil woman.” While Genessin spoke, another sixteen-year-old sitting near me, Noga, who had come to Israel from Ecuador some six years prior, asked when it would be her chance to explain how she felt. I knew that Noga was a passionate speaker and would have made an excellent spokesperson for her peers. However, Noga was not willing to appear in the media with her face or real name, because her friends at school had no idea that she was not Jewish. In fact, her mother told me that Noga and her sister had asked if they could stop putting up a Christmas tree in their apartment, for fear that passersby might spy it from the door. For these reasons, Noga could not play the role George was playing. Noga preferred to simply pass for an Israeli. During a break in the proceedings, many in the audience clustered in small groups. I suddenly heard an impassioned voice rise above the others. Noga had cornered one of Genessin’s assistants, and with all the hierarchy-violating chutzpah she could muster, let fly a torrential wave of righteous fury. She explained to the assistant that she was finishing grade 11 and had just got back from a two-week

186  |  Latinos in Israel pre-compulsory-service army camp, called the Youth Battalions (gadna), where she had received a prize for excellence. She continued: at the camp, Noga was told she would be able to enter one of the prestigious combat units, if she wanted, upon conscription. I later learned that Noga was also the secretary of the tsahala group at her high school, which also helps to prepare pupils for their compulsory service.52 The assistant, clearly taken aback, answered her by saying, “congratulations.” He did not attempt to explain a point of law, or explain policy. Genessin herself clearly heard the exchange, but, while everyone else within earshot had turned to look, Genessin stiffened and gazed indignantly away. No NGO advocate framed Noga’s rhetoric in that moment, but the assistant’s “congratulations”—as reluctant as it was—did represent on a small scale the citizen’s public recognition: it was impossible to deny the uncanny similarity that Noga had mustered. Perhaps the best test of this came later in the day, when ACRI’s media coordinator called me in search of one more interviewee for the Haaretz article. I described to him the exchange between Noga and Genessin’s assistant. It convinced him, and he took Noga’s name and story down to pitch to the reporter. The reporter took Noga as a final interviewee, even though she had not spoken in front of the court, and even though she would not appear with a photo nor with a full name. Noga’s impassioned plea appeared the next day as part of the front-page story in Haaretz, in terms that were very similar to the speech she gave to Genessin’s assistant: N. assimilated well to the school. The Hebrew she speaks is fluent. For school ceremonies, she’s often chosen as the announcer. Recently she returned from the Youth Battalions, where she stood out for excellence. “I made an effort because my dream is to be in the army, either Givati or Golani [infantry brigades],” she says. “Everyone tells me “no,” but what can I do, that’s what I dream. If it’s necessary to sit for an hour and only stare at a single point from the lookout in order to defend the state, I’ll do it. I only want people to understand me, because they aren’t in my position. You can’t deport someone that feels Israeli and wants to defend her country.53

Although she did not appear in front of the court, Noga’s words were easily mediatized and amplified as part of the campaign. This happened despite the fact that, unlike George, Noga would not agree to having a photo of herself, or her real name, appear in the article. Noga’s mother told me that Noga had stated she would rather die than have her friends discover she is a foreign worker. However, Noga did manage to produce a voluble and impassioned rhetoric that fostered immediacy in ways that George could not. Noga’s line about staring at a single point to defend the state was particularly powerful. As usual for print journalism, the reporter stated explicitly that Noga speaks Hebrew fluently. Fluent Hebrew and direct speech to the point of chutzpah, as well as her open desire to serve in the military, helped to produce an effect of public intimacy, a sign of Noga’s

Becoming Israeli Citizens  |  187 rooted native status. The qualities that compelled her to corner the Ministry of Interior attorneys were also those that helped to make Noga into an excellent representative speaker. Advocates wanted speakers like Noga because they easily inhabited the voice of the Israeli child in all but citizenship. Yet these Latino youth were only teenagers, and they experienced their racialization and marginalization in multiple ways. They could not always rise to the occasion and play a public role. Many, like Noga, preferred to simply pass as Israelis. Only Noga’s sudden outburst between proceedings led me, and then also ACRI’s media coordinator and the Haaretz reporter, to amplify her response for greater recognition by other Israeli citizens.

Conclusion If NGO advocates sought to use the voice of the uncannily similar child to challenge Israeli state policies—what came to be called in this period an “immigration policy”—they ran into a difficulty, especially in light of the rightward swing of Israeli political consensus after the end of the Oslo period. The voice of the uncannily similar child, its innocence and authenticity—the Hebrew-speaking voice with its mediatized immediacy—was all too easily detached from the framing voice of liberal, rational policy making. The political consensus that arose around the children of labor migrants did not extend to taking on the radical, liberal ideas about basing immigration on rationalized individual rights, like time spent living and contributing to the economy in Israel. The rational, distant voice of public reason, so often expressed by NGO advocates, was easily discarded by the political class that nonetheless supported the campaign for citizenship. The immediacy of the child’s uncanny similarity could reinforce the rightward shift. The political consensus framed these Hebrew-speaking, Israelieducated children as undeportable: to deport them would produce “cultural exile,” a future projection with uncanny resemblance to (received) nationalist narratives of Jewish history. To propose that deportation would entail “cultural exile” thus equally meant that these labor migrant kids were not comparable to Palestinians, whose deportation—according to governing Israeli politicians— would not produce cultural exile.54 Another way of putting these points is that liberalism is not only a constantly mutating discourse (Boyer 2013, 132), but never actually exists alone. It is one voice that can come to frame, or quote, others, which nonetheless can change it. These relations of framing and framed voices are crucial to understanding not only political message, but how that message can have effects on political struggles, like that over citizenship. Advocates at organizations like ACRI and the Hotline certainly wanted to help kids like George and Noga, as well as the thousands of other labor migrant families that had made Israel their home. Yet they also wanted to go beyond these limits and potentially establish an opening for more

188  |  Latinos in Israel Palestinian inclusion. They wanted (and want) to battle the rightward turn of the Israeli political consensus, and the case of noncitizen labor migrant children was one where they made some gains. These gains may be limited in their scope, yet an opening was nonetheless achieved. Seven months after the trip to the High Court of Justice in Jerusalem, the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert passed the 2006 Resolution, amending that of a year earlier. George, Noga, and many other Latino kids finally received the sought-after pathway to citizenship. Four years later, in 2010, another resolution was passed in favor of another large group of undocumented children of labor migrants, after continued campaigning extended many of the voicing and media strategies of the earlier phases. Yet, so far, the larger goal of a broad challenge to Israel’s citizenship process—how the regime produces gradations of rights and exclusions for Palestinians—has not been accomplished.

Notes 1. The Supreme Court of Israel sits as the High Court of Justice to listen to petitions brought by individuals against governing agencies. 2. The name of the Hotline was changed in 2013 to the Hotline for Refugees and Migrants (moked leplitim vemehagrim). 3. The following highly restrictive criteria were adopted under the government of Ariel Sharon (Likud Party) with Ophir Paz-Pines (Labor Party), the presiding Minister of Interior: (1) the child had to be born in Israel and to have lived there continuously, (2) she or he had to be ten years old by the end of 2005, (3) his or her parents had to have entered Israel legally (i.e., received a tourist or work visa at the border control on a proper passport, as opposed to using a falsified passport or crossing the border without inspection), (4) she or he had to study in an Israeli school and speak Hebrew, such that deporting him or her would amount to “cultural exile.” By the end of the summer of 2005, less than a hundred families had actually submitted the paperwork. Most labor migrant children did not qualify either because they were not born in Israel or they had not lived there ten continuous years, or both. 4. Tamara Traubman, “Wong requested a student visa and received a deportation order: ‘they are exiling us’” [in Hebrew], Haaretz, November 28, 2005, pp. A1 & A8. 5. The Hotline for Migrant Workers was particularly conscious of the importance of fostering relations with reporters to get out stories related to labor migrants. In fact, one origin story for this NGO relates that it got its start when the phone number of one of its founders was published at the end of a news article about the abuse of labor migrants. 6. The new criteria established by the 2006 amendment changed the first two criteria mentioned above in n. 3: the child should be able to prove that he or she (1) lived continuously for five years in Israel (regardless of place of birth) and (2) was over the age of six (i.e., starting first grade). In practice, all the criteria had some flexibility in how the Ministry of Interior bureaucrats interpreted them, and several families went through a much longer process of having their claims looked at individually. 7. In a sense, this displayed loyalty comprises the other side of the coin from complicity, discussed in chapter 5. For Lisa Wedeen (1998), complicity involves displays of fealty without

Becoming Israeli Citizens  |  189 strong conscious commitment, and she finds the disjuncture through public versus private expressions under authoritarian Syria. Erica Weiss (2014) discusses how Jewish refusal to serve in Israel is a contradictory relation to individual liberal conscience. Although Weiss does not discuss complicity as I do in this book, it is clear from her examples that conscientious objection involves a desire to gain a measure of distance from complicity in the colonial regime that rules noncitizen Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. I find Wedeen’s work forces us to go beyond liberal ideologies about how political subjects form. 8. Who serves among Palestinian citizens is complex. Many Bedouin and Druze do serve in ways that go back to the calculations of Mandate Palestine, but there are also Palestinians of other backgrounds who do so (Kanaaneh 2009). On the other hand, there are fierce public debates in Israel about Jewish Israelis who do not serve on religious grounds (especially the ultra-orthodox) or for reasons of political dissent. On the latter see Weiss (2014). 9. The idea of childhood as innocent is not of course a natural consequence but a socio-historical achievement with mass mediated photography playing an important role (Higonnet 1998; Pace 2002). On how children can come to embody innocence, often through rituals of mass mediation, see Malkki (2010), Malkki and Martin (2003), Moeller (2002), Rosen (2007), and Wark (1995). 10. This student arrived in Israel at the age of six from Hong Kong; his mother apparently worked for the Hong Kong diplomatic services. 11. The justices were particularly eager to hear whether the lawyers thought that any government action in favor of children like George would happen only once, or whether the problem of undocumented children of unauthorized immigrants would reappear every few years. 12. Apart from word choice, this highly formal register is also signaled by the use of: (1) ki, “that,” (instead of she-) as a complementizer for embedding reported speech; (2) the article ha-, “the,” placed on the final word in construct phrases or compounds (instead of on the first word); (3) the article ha- for embedding a relative clause (instead of the shecomplementizer); (4) determiner ze, “this,” without the article ha-; (5) suffixed genitive (including possessive) pronouns or double genitives (instead of only genitive pronoun shel, “of”); (6) suffixed negator eyn, “is not” (instead of unsuffixed lo); and (7) frequent construct (compound) noun phrases instead of longer collocations that include a verb phrase. 13. “masbira be’atira, ki tnay haleyda ba’arets, kemo gam hatnay hamityaxes le’ofen knisat hahore le’isra’el, eynam magshimim et taxlit hahesder shekava’a hamemshela [. . .] medinyut hamemshela be’inyan ze menugedet af le’arkeya shel medinat isra’el kemedina yehudit demokratit, hamexabedet zxuyot adam veshokelet bexavod rosh shikulim humanitari’im vehamexuyavut lexaved et hagerim hashoxenim ba velidog lirvaxatam.” http://www.acri.org.il/he/1164, accessed August 1, 2016. 14. The concept of ger was regularly used to frame labor migrants by advocacy groups: for example, the Hotline called one of its early reports “For You Were Strangers,” and cited Leviticus 22:20. Traditionally, ger was used as an intermediate category between the people of Israel and the other nations, and the root is found in the Hebrew term for converting to Judaism. 15. See the introduction for a discussion about the distinction made between “state of return” and “state of immigration.” 16. That is, within Bakhtin’s typology of voicing structures, there was no hybridization (1981a, 301–20) between the innocent voice of the child and the framing voice of liberal advocates.

190  |  Latinos in Israel 17. There are other examples. The Israeli Scouts national leadership had links to government officials, and according to the coordinators at the Eitan Troop (see chap. 3), the leadership supported the campaign. Also, a senior person at the Hotline knew officials of the Labor Party, still one of the major Israeli political parties. 18. Tamara Traubman, “Wong requested a student visa and received a deportation order: ‘they are exiling us’” [in Hebrew], Haaretz, November 28, 2005, pp. A1 & A8. 19. Dan Izenberg, “‘Foreign’ children fight deportation. Civil rights, migrant workers groups petition Supreme Court,” Jerusalem Post, November 28, 2005. 20. Previous to that school year, Bialik elementary school and Rogozin high school were run separately, in nearby buildings. Both were known for the high proportion of pupils that were the children of labor migrants. 21. For example, Boaz Gaon, “Girl of Hope” [in Hebrew], Maariv, Weekend Supplement, December 26, 2003, pp. 24–30; Moran Zelikovitsch, “Siempre Listo” [in Hebrew], Ha’ir, November 6, 2003, pp. 16–17; Ronen Tal, “Endangered Tribe” [in Hebrew], Yedioth Aharonoth, 24 Sha’ot, September 8, 2005, pp. 1, 13, 15. 22. “yaldey ovdim zarim bediyun babeyt hamishpat ha’elyon beyerushalayim, etmol. “zohi hakatovet ha’axrona,” amru hayeladim.” 23. Importantly, “public reason” here means, as Povinelli (2002, 6) describes it, “the enlightenment idea that society should be organized on the basis of rational mutual understanding.” Povinelli is interested in the historical processes by which the radical alterity of indigenous peoples is critically abducted, as she puts it, in various sites, from court cases about territorial claims to the marketing of commodities. Crucially, Povinelli argues that through these historical processes, which intertwine legal abstractions and impassioned rhetoric, the indigenous subject ends up performing a vital role for the liberal subject of the public sphere, who gains a certain historical consciousness about past wrongs committed— wrongs that can be righted by recognition. 24. The Oslo Accords, and the separation that preceded them, were heavily criticized by some Palestinians and Israelis even as they were unfolding. For just two examples out of many, see Mouin Rabbani’s interview with Edward Said (1995) as well as Gadi Algazi (1993). 25. See the introduction for more. 26. At the outbreak of the Second Intifada, thirteen Palestinian citizens were killed and many more injured and arrested. As Rouhana and Sabbagh-Khoury discuss, the subsequent commission that inquired into the police actions led to no arrests or sanctioning of police officers, leading to a large demonstration by Palestinian citizens. 27. Due to considerations of scope, I am leaving out a vital aspect of the difference between the 1990s Oslo period, as part of the response to the First Intifada, as opposed to the post-Oslo period, as part of the response to the Second Intifada. Israeli politicians respond in particular ways to the conditions of a North Atlantic–centered global arena. The Oslo Accords were signed in the wake of the end of the Cold War, which a US-centered bloc celebrated as the victory of liberal capitalism over the Soviet-led communist bloc. The global arena to which Israel is oriented promoted liberalization as part of this victory lap. On the other hand, the beginning of the Second Intifada came a year before the attacks of 9/11 and the ensuing “War on Terror” and its emphasis on securitization. That is, this period saw a difference in emphasis, which influenced Israeli policy making as well as the mediatization of political message. For useful thoughts on these issues, see Beinin and Stein (2006), Gordon (2008, 190), Peutz and de Genova (2010).

Becoming Israeli Citizens  |  191 28. Although there have been arrests and deportations of children since 2011 (see Kfir and Kemp 2016, 17n6), one senior NGO advocate noted to me in 2017 it largely still holds true that children who speak Hebrew fluently are not included. For the most part, she explained, it is children three and under who are deported, that is, before they begin to attend Israeli educational institutions. 29. In this mostly metaphorical use of the term “uncanny,” I am drawing on Sigmund Freud’s (1919) initial concern for explaining the feeling of dread or haunting around certain “doubles” (and not others) as displaying signs of repression. I am not however committed to Freud’s arguments about the castration complex and other specific repressions. 30. “ze lo inyan humanitari. [. . .] hahaxlata hi xagurat nefets tadmitit, kalkalit, xevratit, veyehudit, ve’anu nimtsa’im bemidron xalaklak shesofo ovdan zehut.” Yishai was then Minister of Industry, Trade, and Labor. Barak Ravid, “Minister of Industry, Trade and Labor in response to regularization of the children of foreign workers: end of the Jewish state” [in Hebrew], NRG, June 18, 2006, http://www.nrg.co.il/online/1 /ART1/437/001.html. 31. The specific verse Peres quotes from the Torah is somewhat unusual, since it comes without the usual injunctions to love the stranger (ger) and to remember that Israelites also once lived as strangers. 32. The letter was linked in PDF format from a Ynet article about it. See Ronen Medzini, “Peres to the Minister of Interior: reconsider the deportation of foreigners’ children” [in Hebrew], Ynet, July 30, 2009, http://www.ynet.co.il/articlesnc/0,7340,L-3754517,00.html. 33. In the case of Olmert and Netanyahu, moreover, their wives played important public roles in championing the cause of labor migrant children, as well as entreating their husbands to consider passing a resolution in favor of these youth. 34. Relly Saar, “Ministry of Justice: Granting citizenship to the children of foreign workers will require granting citizenship to Palestinian children” [in Hebrew], Haaretz, July 26, 2004, http://www.haaretz.co.il/misc/article-print-page/1.985175. 35. Shinu’i was, as Chetrit (2010, 19) points out, a party that drew its base from Ashkenazi elites, as part of reaction to the religious, Mizrahi-based party, Shas, which draws its voters from impoverished and working-class areas. 36. Nablus is in the Occupied Territories, while Umm El-Fahm is a large Arab-Israeli town in the so-called “triangle” area near the West Bank. 37. Relly Saar, “Poraz’s proposal: 800 children of foreign workers will be deported, 600 will stay” [in Hebrew], Haaretz, October 17, 2004, http://www.hotline.org.il/hebrew​ /news/2004/Haaretz101704.htm; also cited in Kemp and Raijman (2008, 193). 38. In the summer of 2005 in fact, a former Ministry of Interior employee publicly accused the Ministry of playing politics with the numbers, and deliberately inflating estimates of how many children could benefit from the citizenship resolution as a means to defeat it. No doubt the difference in numbers was partially achieved by including noncitizen Palestinian children. Even the Minister of the Interior at the time of the passage of the 2005 Resolution, Ophir Paz-Pines, was skeptical about the numbers being used by officials in his ministry; see Shahar Ilan, “State of immigration? No! State of aliyah” [in Hebrew], Haaretz.co.il, June 30, 2005, http://www.haaretz.co.il/misc/1.1023172. 39. The organizations signing the statement on principles are: Kav La’Oved, ACRI, the Hotline for Migrant Workers, Physicians for Human Rights, the Tel Aviv University Program in Law and Welfare, and the Adva Center for Information on Equality and Social Justice in Israel. See http://www.acri.org.il/pdf/migrantworkers0809.pdf, accessed August 21, 2015.

192  |  Latinos in Israel 40. Tal Rozner, “Cheshin: the state created a modern version of slavery” [in Hebrew], ynet. co.il, March 30, 2006, http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3234180,00.html. Although there have been changes since 2006, the binding policy still largely remains in place. 41. The idea of granting citizenship for contributing to the economy is made in scholarly circles, for example, by Sassen (1998). Joseph Carens (1987) famously made the argument for “open borders” based on liberal ideals about valuing the individual. 42. Relly Saar and Gideon Alon, “The government approved: permanent residence for children of foreigners who were born in Israel” [in Hebrew], Haaretz, June 27, 2005, p. A5. 43. The Thai teenager did qualify. 44. In an earlier phase of the campaign, there were several media reports promoted by engaged teachers at Rogozin High School that had focused on Filipino sisters who attended there, using a message that they were good students and intended to serve in the military. They did not ever appear uniformed in photos. See Yehudit Yehezkieli, “One of ours” [in Hebrew], Yedioth Aharonoth, 24 Sha’ot, February 11, 2004, pp. 14–15; Reuben Weiss, Natasha Muzgovaya, and David Regev, “‘I want to enlist in the commandos’” [in Hebrew], Yedioth Aharonoth, January 20, 2004; Eyal Hareuveni, “How many children of foreign workers are there in the country? It depends on whom you ask” [in Hebrew], Ynet, February 24, 2004, http://www.ynet.co.il/Ext/Comp/ArticleLayout/CdaArticlePrintPreview/1,2506 ,L-2879517,00.html; Moran Zelikovitsch, “Students of Rogozin in Tel Aviv: don’t deport our friends” [in Hebrew], Ynet, March 3, 2005, http://www.yedtichon.co.il/Articles/2916​ .htm; Gil Horev, “Foreigners in our midst” [in Hebrew], NRG, April 11, 2005, http://www​ .nrg.co.il/online/4/ART/919/728.html; Tamara Schreiber, “Thou shalt not make for yourself immigration police” [in Hebrew], Globes, April 11, 2005, http://www.globes.co.il/news/home​ .aspx?fid=2&did=903317. 45. Many of the Israeli activists who were involved in working and advocating with labor migrant children and youth were influenced directly or indirectly by the critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire. For a discussion of Freire’s work and influence, see Cody (2013). 46. For example, in one session the director had the kids act out a torture scene. Later, in the wrap-up discussion, he asked them to reflect on this and other exercises and express how they felt. 47. Ronen Tal, “Endangered tribe” [in Hebrew], Yedioth Aharonoth, 24 Sha’ot, September 8, 2005, pp. 1, 13, 15. 48. The caption in figure 6.2 mentions China as one of the countries of origin, but it is not clear to whom the editors thought they were referring. My guess is that they meant to say Philippines. 49. When not mentioning their specific country of origin, I often heard young Latinos talking about themselves with their multiethnic classmates as “sfaradim” (Spanish) or even “latinim” (Latins), both unusual uses for most Israeli contexts. However, it is clear that these Latinos were looking for a term commensurate with “Latino,” rather than using the more common “drom amerikay” (South American). 50. See the introduction and chapter 2 for more on Israeli interactional directness. 51. Revital Hovel, “The State Attorney’s Office will establish a department to treat migrants” [in Hebrew], Haaretz, March 5, 2013, http://www.haaretz.co.il/news/education​ /.premium-1.1948421. 52. tsahala uses the Hebrew acronym for the Israeli Defense Forces (the Israeli military) tsahal, and adds the directional suffix /-a/, so it translates as “toward the IDF.”

Becoming Israeli Citizens  |  193 53. Tamara Traubman, “Wong requested a student visa and received a deportation order: ‘they are exiling us’” [in Hebrew], Haaretz, November 28, 2005, pp. A1 & A8. 54. Neve Gordon (2008) has discussed how deportations have been used since 1967 to control noncitizen Palestinians. In some sense, as discussed in the introduction, expulsions and the exile of Palestinians have been part of the making of Israeli citizenship regime since before the state period.

Epilogue The Unexpected Citizen as Voice of Response

B

etween June 2005 and June 2006, during the campaign for citizenship, Latinos came to publicly represent the unexpected citizen in Israel. Latino youth, supported by their families and a variety of advocates, communicated their national belonging for Israeli publics and made it impossible for leading Israeli politicians and bureaucrats to deport them. They inhabited Israeli publicness to near perfection and conveyed the message that they were Israeli in all but citizenship: “Israeli for all intents and purposes” (yisra’eli lekol dvar ve’inyan). They helped shape public opinion on citizenship and thus helped give shape to the continuing cultural politics of Israel/Palestine. And they did so using the quintessential signs of national culture: their indistinguishable Hebrew, their interactional directness, their references to Israeli popular culture, and so on. Prime ministers, journalists, and Israeli elites of many kinds registered their surprise at the uncanny similarity of these youth and found it difficult to speak of deporting them. The success of the youth’s mediatized appearances suggests some of the contingencies involved in establishing boundaries of belonging, as well as how unexpected are the outcomes of struggles for citizenship. The success also suggests that some of the insurgency of citizenship (Holston 2008), the ability of groups to struggle against exclusion through the institutions of citizenship, comes from engagement with the public sphere. Labor migrants and unauthorized immigrants of all kinds do not live “in the shadows.” They are addressed and interpellated by practices of publicness in multiple crisscrossing contexts, and, equally importantly, they develop a response. This book traced out the complexity of that response, as well as its ambivalence. The response does not start and end in the paradigmatic sites of the public sphere, where subaltern peoples seem to come “out of the shadows” in order to speak “in their own voice.” The response of subaltern immigrants begins on the day of their arrival, if not before, as they cross borders and checkpoints, where they try to speak and behave in ways that correspond to bureaucratic categories. Risking a great deal, they need to gain entry. Latinos arriving in Israel usually behaved like tourists coming to see the Holy Land, which got them the limited

Epilogue | 195 capacities of a tourist visa. Those arrivals soon became much more involved, however, as they sought to arrange housing, work, and school for children and thus had to respond to Israeli landlords, employers, school officials, and so forth. Latinos (and unauthorized immigrants from other regions) thus began accruing substantive rights, and then, at a particular historical conjuncture, they could— mostly through youth—make unexpected claims for formal citizenship. One of the unexpected aspects of citizenship that this book discusses is that as Latino unauthorized immigrants found their responses and established themselves in Israel, they also gained de facto substantive rights: housing, work, schooling, and so forth. Whether they picked up some jargon English (like Diana Laura in chap. 1) or some jargon Hebrew, or whether employers or children helped, the multiple contexts of responding came to enable Latino social life in Israel. Not all responses were equally successful, and many rights were denied, delimited, or taken away through deportation. Further, as Latinos tell the story, the process of adapting was often painful, and Israeli interactional directness was part of the challenge. For these many reasons, Latinos often felt great ambivalence about their response, and about the forms of inclusion that they did manage. As we saw especially in the first half of the book, Latinos declared their love for Israel and also wondered about their own differences. Latino adults, who went through the pain of immigration, often remembered the Latin American places they left as impoverished and difficult, yet also a place where people were warmer, with greater educación. They remembered a publicness associated with alegría (joy), and where they did not feel so marginalized. The voice of the Israeli was a problem: Latino adults adopted and adapted it as far as they could, but always felt it chiefly came from their employers and landlords, and even from police officers. That is, Latino adults both adopted Israeli voices and felt their strangeness. Even the way their own children talked to them could feel strange and yet also suggest a more modern form of educación. This tension could never be resolved. Is it any wonder then that for these immigrants, whose migration is motivated and shaped by a fragmented globality, their children are the ultimate response? Parents regularly explained that their sacrifice is to bring a better life to their children, and Latino youth often reproduced this explanation when asked why their parents came to Israel. Another way of understanding the campaign for citizenship, then, is as Latino families producing a public message for Israelis: we can (re)produce Israeli children as well as you. They will speak your language like you, they will fight in your army, they will live and work here next to you, acting just like you. Such a message is especially effective given the plasticity of children, who can easily acquire a language along with the extensive repertoire of local registers. Such a message is especially effective because the mediatization of the voice of children and youth can produce a public recognition of their (seeming) innocence.

196  |  Latinos in Israel And here is a source of fear for some nationalists: the lability of voice—the ease with which those who are supposed to be culturally different can nonetheless come to sound like nationalists themselves. Such voices, and the interactional devices used to indicate them, have their own mobility, appearing in new contexts, and encountering other voices—as when Latino children speak with directness in Hebrew and hear their parents’ hierarchical Spanish educación in return. Or when Latino youth can produce uncanny similarity in the mediatized message of the campaign for citizenship—challenging ultranationalist politicians’ desire to remove foreigners. This fear, I would argue, lay at the basis of the encounter that began this book: when Noga challenged Yochi Genessin and her assistants at the Supreme Court. Here suddenly was the unexpected voice of the Israeli teenager, coming from a sixteen-year-old who had only arrived six years earlier in Israel. Noga had already adopted the public voice of Israeli nationalism. Is it any wonder that Genessin did not turn around to face her? Nationalists fear this lability: Could it be that easy? Did Jewish roots not matter at all? One Israeli, Chaim, of Mizrahi background and the owner of a small shop in the Jaffa Flea Market, once made this point to me. He hung around a lot with the Latinos of la cancha (the soccer field), joined them at salsa clubs, and dated Latinas. Chaim told me that the Torah and Jewish family together represented “roots of hundreds of years.” Latinos, he felt, had a different “mentality” that did not tie them to the country: “tomorrow he [a Latino] could be in Australia.” Despite his reservations, Chaim described Latinos as nice people, and wished that the Immigration Police would spend more time chasing the non-Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union, whom he clearly did not like. The fear about the lability of national signs was also expressed by Eli Yishai, then leader of Shas, the religious Mizrahi political party, when in 2006 he called the recognition of foreign workers’ children an “explosives belt” (xagurat nefets) for Israeli identity (quoted in chap. 6). If any non-Jew can become indistinguishable from an Israeli, and thus be granted citizenship, then the boundaries of national belonging will be muddied. By comparing the recognition of labor migrant children to the Palestinian suicide bombers who wore explosives belts, Yishai seeks to mobilize public opinion through Israeli fear of Palestinians, and especially of Palestinian demographics. Yishai and those who sided with him failed in the case of these unauthorized immigrants: they failed to undermine the mediatized message of the youth’s uncanny similarity. Genessin herself only wanted to answer Noga in court, with legal arguments. What might Genessin have said if she had permitted herself to turn around and respond to Noga? Perhaps Genessin might have tried to mollify Noga, explaining the bureaucratic rationale in terms of the good of the nation that Noga wants to defend. Genessin might have said, “Listen, it’s complicated. I can hear that you are very passionate and you can be trusted. Understand though that we can’t let

Epilogue | 197 everyone in. If we let you in, what about all the Arabs?” Genessin had already defeated some of the proposals for a pathway to citizenship using precisely that argument: how could unauthorized immigrant children like Noga, the children of “foreign workers,” be legally distinguished from the children of noncitizen Palestinians who might be growing up among Palestinian citizens? The demographic demon—and really the specter of Palestinian return from exile—weighed down heavily on the campaign. How else might Genessin have answered Noga? Genessin might have drawn a harder line in the sand, based on the fact that Noga is not Jewish according to bureaucratized kinship criteria. That is, Noga cannot claim any form of Jewish descent by which the Israeli state could recognize her as a Jew.1 Perhaps Genessin is truly committed to the purity of the race, like Yishai, and does not only worry about Palestinians who might take advantage of the precedent. Genessin might have said to Noga, “Look, we didn’t come here to mix with just anyone.” That is one response that I heard from a high school principal. As part of the campaign for citizenship, Latino parents began to gather documents that could show that their children met requirements for long-term residence in Israel. One document that was absolutely necessary was the school certificate. A Colombian mother called me one day to say that she was having trouble getting her daughter’s school to issue a certificate. The principal of the school delayed, for reasons that the mother could not understand. I called the principal to see what was the matter. Speaking with a Spanish language accent, the principal told me that the school had tried to help the “illegals,” and she wanted to know why the mother needed the certificate. I explained the campaign to her. She replied that she also had come from Latin America, for ideological reasons, and that I was only focusing on the specific case rather than the larger picture. The campaign, she said, only “adds garbage [xarta barta]” to “the garbage that’s already here.” The principal saw the campaign as muddying the purity of the Jewish population. The mediatized message of the campaign was the response to Israelis like Yishai, Genessin, Chaim, and this principal. Unexpectedly, the uncanny similarity of Latino youth’s public voice successfully overcame such opposition. The opening provoked by their message enabled the recognition of hundreds of Latino families, as well as labor migrant families of other regional backgrounds. Yet lurking in the background was whether the principle of a greater inclusion could also extend to noncitizen Palestinians. Yishai and Genessin and others sensed this. Against their opposition, NGO advocates sought to establish a principle for rationalizing Israel’s immigration policy and create a greater response: Palestinians can also be included. Advocates’ rational-critical—and often legal—voices framed the voices of Latino youth, always part of a broader campaign to return the Israeli political consensus to the period of the early 1990s, when, in the wake of the end of the Cold War, the liberal promises of the Oslo

198  |  Latinos in Israel Accords suggested alternative forms of inclusion in Israel/Palestine. However, for the most part, the swing of the Israeli political consensus to the right following the Second Intifada—and post-9/11 securitization globally—has produced the defeat of these NGOs’ efforts. The campaign for citizenship was successful, however, which draws attention to the continuing strength of the pre-state distinction between Jew and Arab. The fact that three different Israeli governments, led by three different prime ministers, passed government Resolutions (in 2005, 2006, and 2010) in favor of granting citizenship to the children of labor migrants points to this continuing strength. Ultimately, these Israeli governments believed that the children of labor migrants could be reliably distinguished from noncitizen Palestinians: the foundational colonial marker remained on Palestinians. The children of foreign workers on the other hand did find a way to mitigate their marked entrance into Israeli politics—partially.

Citizenship from the Margins: The Continuing Struggle against Inequality Here we see the analytic purchase of looking at citizenship from its margins. Since differentiated citizenship processes are continuously creating gradations in rights, a study of how those who are struggling to change their status do so exposes many of the mechanics of exclusion. The campaign for citizenship certainly brought the mechanics of Israeli citizenship to light, but the effects of these processes resonate throughout the social life of Latinos in Israel. Here also we see the vital role of what Bakhtin calls voices, and their mediatization in public sphere contexts. While citizenship processes at their largest and most effective scales occur through the preeminent and authoritative sites of the public sphere, the voices defined there continue to appear and encounter one another in much smaller-scale contexts: at schools, at youth organizations, at the soccer field (la cancha), in homes, on the street. For Latinos, these voices are not only defined in Israeli public worlds. Some come from Latin American worlds: the voice of the authoritarian parent bent on hierarchical educación, the voice of alegría in stranger sociality, the voice of the chismoso, the voice of el sapo. It is not possible to understand how these noncitizen Latinos struggled for citizenship without considering these voicing relations, how they play out across different settings. These voicing relations have an enduring political impact. Gaining recognition through the government Resolutions was not the end of the struggle against the inequalities produced by citizenship. When I returned for two months of fieldwork in 2007, many Latinos had already received their papers. Latino youth and children who qualified for the amended Resolution of 2006 had received permanent residence, while their parents and any siblings who

Epilogue | 199 did not qualify received temporary residence. This temporary residence would be renewed every couple of years as long as the qualifying family member remained in the country. Once the Latino youth and children completed their military service, they would become full citizens and their family members could apply for citizenship. Military service, as a sacrifice for the state, was the final barrier to recognition as a full citizen. When I met them a year later, many families proudly showed me their new identity cards. For many, at the same time, new questions had come up. Julián for example was trying to determine how to continue after high school. Confident and charming, Julián was then eighteen, having arrived from Ecuador at the age of twelve, and he had a noticeable Spanish-language accent in his Hebrew. His mother had great expectations for him, and before the passage of the 2006 Resolution she had considered sending him to a church-affiliated university after high school. Now that the family was secure that they could stay, Julián had a decision before him: to go to the military or not. His mother had told me that Julián wanted to do more than his compulsory service of three years: do an extra two years and the military would help pay for university. But that was five years away. When I talked to Julián, he was not so sure he wanted to be a combat soldier. We talked about the possibility that he could do noncombat tasks in the military, maybe a desk job or working in computers. Julián had no idea how to find out about these possibilities, and asked me. Julián was looking for a path to upward mobility, and especially to a university degree, but not necessarily a combat role. However, coming from a precarious labor migrant family, Julián was at a severe disadvantage: even the question of how to navigate the military appeared daunting. Julián’s story was symptomatic of the differing trajectories of the adult and child generations. Latino adults had come to Israel in search of social mobility through finding a better-paying position in a global labor market. In Latin America, they faced severe limitations in their capacity to earn part of the social wealth (what Marshall [1950] calls “social rights”), but they were much more attuned to that public culture, did not risk deportation, and generally had a lowermiddle-class status. They traded this for higher wages but downward mobility in their occupational status. In Israel, they were “foreign workers,” highly deportable labor, keeping their heads above water largely through cleaning and caring in the homes of Israel’s wealthier families. When families began to get their papers, several adults told me about their hopes to leave the backbreaking work of cleaning and caring. Many had started to dream of improving their Hebrew as a means to enter more white-collar professions. For example, Luna, a Colombian woman in her forties with one son, had set up private Hebrew classes with three other friends, and she told me of her hope to enter work that would not take such a toll on her body, such as working as

200  |  Latinos in Israel a teller in a bank. With the help of a Colombian immigrant friend, she had even started to put together a resume. Many others also had begun to dream about this upward mobility, and they understood that learning Hebrew was crucial to forging this path. Once again, Israeli publicness—in its form of standard Hebrew—stood in their way to greater equality. In reality, these Latino border-crossers had an intergenerational strategy: to regain status, their children would need to go up the ladder. That is why Julián’s mother, who worked cleaning and caring for homes, wanted him to go to university. To do so in Israel, Julián would need a high degree of competence in the formal registers of Israeli Hebrew, as well as an excellent command of English. That is, much worked against Julián’s hopes, and those of many other Latino youth. When I met several Latino families again in 2015, those hopes were still in the air, but unfulfilled. Many Latino youth were now cleaning houses too, while others had low-income jobs in factories or restaurants. The difficult position in which Latino youth had started, as marked foreign workers growing up in low-income neighborhoods, was now converted into a racialized class. Citizenship was still producing inequality in their lives. This study emphasizes the vital mediating role of publicly produced voices in citizenship. These voices and their voicings throughout multiple settings are part and parcel of the way citizenship processes reproduce inequality. The study of language has shown not only that these voices are fundamental to politics, but also that they become essential to how noncitizens and citizens alike interpret the meaning of citizenship. Fighting inequality requires constant attention to how publicness shapes citizenship, and vice versa. The challenge, as many already know, is producing forms of publicness that will force the Yochi Genessins of the world to turn around.

Notes 1. Since 1970, the Law of Return in Israel recognizes the descendants of Jews to the third generation, plus their spouses and children—even if the person is not Jewish her- or himself. That is, a person need only show to the immigration authorities abroad (generally, the Jewish Agency) that she or he had a single Jewish grandparent in order to qualify for the right to immigrate and automatically become an Israeli citizen upon entering the country. Further, that qualifying person could bring immediate family as well. In this way, for example, tens of thousands of non-Jews from the former Soviet Union managed to immigrate to Israel in the 1990s. Stories abound of the falsification of the documents necessary to show a Jewish grandparent.

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Index

agency, 30–34, 52–53, 167; economy and migration, 45–46, 51, 100–101; media, 167, 183–184; narration, speech or language, 39–41, 45, 49–51, 114–115 Agha, Asif, 25n7, 29n42, 35, 61–62, 82n13, 107n4, 162 alcachofas (Printed Community Gossip), 119–133 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 33 Arabic, 16; racialization and colonialism, 20–23, 29n41, 158n8, 175, 180–181 Arendt, Hannah, 5, 86 Bauman, Richard, 5, 17, 21, 85 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 21–22, 35, 54n17, 81n9, 133n3, 198; state speech, 139. See also chronotope; heteroglossia; voice belonging: Israeli history, 98; national, 3–4, 16, 21, 80, 102–103; transnational, 12. See also citizenship bilingualism, x, 58–59, 82n11, 96–98. See also code-switching; Hebrew campaign against labor migrants, 2, 24, 136–161. See also citizenship: campaign for citizenship; Immigration Authority and Police chisme (gossip), 23–24, 111–35, 138, 140–141, 149–51; chismoso/a publicness and voice, 112–114, 119, 125, 129–133, 198. See also gossip; interactional practice; language: evidentiality; publicness; rumor chronotope (space and time), 30–35, 38, 48–49, 129, 133n3, 160n34, 166; Bakhtin’s definition, 35, 54n17. See also Bakhtin; modernist chronotope churches, ix, 47, 55n29, 77, 89, 93, 108n14, 135n16, 153–154, 168–169, 199 chutzpah. See interactional directness

citizenship, 4–7, 194–195; campaign for, ix–xi, 16–17, 99–100, 103–107, 138–140, 151–152, 161–193; capacity to claim citizenship, 2–4, 13, 30–33, 38, 40–42, 53, 84, 138–142, 151–157, 194–195; gossip and citizenship, 129–133; language and citizenship, 6–7, 16–23, 41–42, 170–183. See also belonging; noncitizens; unexpected citizens code-switching, 56, 59–61, 81n10. See also bilingualism; footing; Hebrew commensuration, 57, 77, 170–181, 192n49; language commensuration, 83–111 communicative circuits, 2, 10–12, 23–24, 29n42, 111–121, 130–133, 137–142, 146, 161. See also sapos (police informers) complicity, 137–138, 141–142, 151–158. See also sapos (police informers) cultural politics, ix–x, 3, 13–14, 17–20, 27n22, 35–36, 44–45, 49, 58, 77–80, 80n3, 84, 86, 163, 170, 194–197. See also Hebrew; publicness criminalization, 2–3, 142–150, 155–158 De Genova, Nicholas, 13, 24–25n2, 136–137 demographics, 1, 13–16, 17, 93, 136–139, 170–177, 183, 196–197 deportation, ix–xi, 1–3, 11–12, 17, 36–39, 47, 62, 75–77, 88–89, 119–120, 145, 154, 159n24, 160nn34–35, 161–169, 172–187, 193n54, 194–195; deportability, 6, 13, 94, 130, 133, 136–151, 153, 156–157, 160n30, 180–182, 191n28, 199. See also De Genova, Nicholas deportability. See deportation Dick, Hilary Parsons, 32, 66–67, 139, 159n25, 160n32. See also modernist chronotope dugri. See interactional directness educación (politeness, civility), xi, 19, 23, 56–83, 91, 94, 107, 151, 195–196, 198. See also

221

222 | Index educación (cont.) interactional directness: maleducación (rudeness) Eitan (Israeli Scout troop). See Israeli Scouts Errington, Joseph, 60, 82nn11–12, 139 evidentiality. See language footing, 58, 60–63, 115, 138–139; Hebrew and Spanish, 60–72. See also code-switching foreign workers, 1–2, 7, 25–26n9, 99, 118–119, 137–146, 152–153, 156–157, 159n10, 159n24, 163, 167–169, 186, 199–200; children of, 177–183, 191n30, 196–198; guest worker programs, 8–12, 176; history of (in Israel), 7–10, 12–13, 16–17, 86–87. See also immigration; labor: migrants Gal, Susan, 5, 7, 81n7, 113 gender, 19, 22, 46–48, 85–106; chisme, 115–116; publicness, 133n4 Goffman, Erving, 60, 81n6, 81n10, 115, 130, 133. See also footing gossip, 107, 111–114, 119, 134nn5–6, 134n9, 136. See also chisme (gossip), language: evidentiality; rumor Habermas, Jürgen, 5, 25n6, 29n42, 85, 107n6, 134n9 Hebrew, 28, 45, 77, 115; immigration, 3, 20–22, 32–35, 38, 50–51, 53n2, 72, 90, 157, 167, 170, 172, 191n28, 195–196, 199–200; media, 112, 166, 181, 186–188; performing loyalty, 2, 5, 17–20, 22–23, 29n41, 31, 51, 84, 152–153, 157, 160n35, 161–165, 172–177, 179–180, 188n3, 194; transcription (note on), xvii. See also bilingualism; codeswitching; commensuration: language commensuration; cultural politics; footing; immigration; Israel; nationalism heteroglossia, 21–22, 29nn38–39, 81n9, 139, 163, 189n16, 198. See also Bakhtin, Mikhail Holston, James, 4–6; differentiated and insurgent citizenship, 25n4, 170–171; gradation of rights, 194 immigration, 3, 16, 80; disorientation, 32–38, 40–42, 44–45, 49–50, 64, 76, 84, 88–90,

107, 195; Israeli history and sociology of, 15, 26n13, 28n35, 109n31, 200n1; politics and policy of (bureaucracy and statistics), 3, 12–13, 117–118, 147, 165–166, 176–178, 185, 187–188, 191n38, 182n44; stories of, 12, 72, 79, 160nn34–35, 184–185; terms, 25n9. See also bilingualism; foreign workers; ­Hebrew; Immigration Authority and Police Immigration Authority and Police, 2, 76, 119, 130, 135n18, 136–161, 185, 196, 197; establishment of, ix, 11, 13, 16–17, 47, 86, 120, 172. See also campaign against labor migrants informers. See sapos (police informers) Inoue, Miyako, 5, 20, 139 interactional directness, 19–21, 23, 28n32, 49–52, 58, 61, 69, 75, 79–80, 185–186, 194–196; chutzpah (xutspa), 2–3, 17–18, 52, 59, 102–103, 181, 184–187; dugri, 19–20, 28n31, 28n35; maleducación (rudeness), 56, 60, 65, 71, 74, 80n3, 91, 102–103, 108n19. See also Hebrew; interactional practice; language interactional practice, 3, 5–7, 17–18, 19–20, 22–23, 28n28, 29n40, 32–33, 49–53, 55n26, 56–59, 63, 72, 75, 80, 107, 140–141; gossip, 111, 112–115, 119, 132–133, 134n6, 150. See also chisme (gossip); interactional directness; language interdiscursivity, 3, 6–7, 138–139, 149–150. See also communicative circuits intermediary roles, x, 112, 116; citizenship, x; employers, 33–35, 40–41, 50–51, 57, 59, 71–72, 108n9, 118, 126, 160n35, 195; employers targeted by state anti-immigration campaigns, 142–146, 152, 176; jefe, 42–46, 52–53; welfare organizations in south Tel Aviv, 84–86. See also La Escuelita; nongovernmental organizations; sapos (police informers) Intifada: First, 8, 9, 190n27; Second, 20, 163, 170–72, 190nn26–27, 198 intimacy, 3, 6, 33, 36–37, 53n4, 126, 143, 144; cultural (or public, national), 1, 17–18, 23, 43, 49, 52, 55n27, 80n3, 118, 132–133, 141, 186–187; dark side (state surveillance), 146, 149–150; register and voices of, 80–81,

Index | 223

Katriel, Tamar, 19–20, 28n35, 98, 103, 109n30, 109n32 Kemp, Adriana, 9–10, 15, 17, 27n20, 87, 160n30, 169, 172, 174–175 Kockelman, Paul, 114, 135n13, 137, 141, 149, 158n6

language: evidentiality, 114, 118, 119, 125, 134–135nn12–13, 135n23, 140–141; ideology, 17, 20, 28nn28–29, 29n40, 33, 49–52, 55n26, 57, 61–63, 80, 81n7, 81n9; jargon, 53n4; “mixing,” 59, 91–92; reflexivity, 20–24, 29n40, 55n26, 58, 61–66, 69, 72, 111, 114, 115, 129, 141, 149–150, 159n14; standardization, x, 17, 28n29, 61–62, 81n9, 84, 89, 91, 105, 112, 126, 138–139, 199–200. See also chisme (gossip); citizenship; Hebrew; interactional practice; Spanish Latin America: emigration, 11, 12, 42; family sanctity, 55n29, 57, 62 Latinos: cancha (soccer field), 112, 113, 119–133, 135n18, 196, 198; diaspora, 23, 61, 66–67, 83–84, 98, 107n1; parents (stereotypes), 20, 22–23, 34, 42, 45, 52–66, 71–72, 76, 82n13, 85, 87–91, 98, 106, 108n15, 108n19, 174–175, 195–196. See also Latin America Lemon, Alaina, 85, 107n5 liberalism, 5, 8–9, 25n7, 26n15, 86, 113, 158n7, 165, 187–189, 189n7, 189n16, 190n23, 190n27, 192n41; neoliberalism, 8, 12–13, 171. See also Israel: economic ­neoliberalization; nongovernmental ­organizations (NGOs) loyalty. See Hebrew; state

labor, 4–5, 13, 26, 75, 86, 199; children of labor immigrants, 88–89, 99, 105, 146, 152–158, 159n28, 161–188, 188n3, 190n20, 191n33, 192n45, 196, 198; in Israel, 8–10, 12, 39, 55n23, 143, 146, 152, 160, 164, 197; migrants, 9–13, 17–20, 24, 25n9, 34, 37, 39, 55n23, 83, 84, 87, 117–118, 130, 137–144, 155, 160n33, 164, 171–172, 187, 188n5, 189n14, 194, 199; social, 48. See also deportation; foreign workers La Escuelita, x, 30–31, 83–91, 99, 103, 107, 108nn13–14, 108nn19–20, 122, 146, 150, 164, 166–167, 179–80; El Festival Folklórico y Cultural (El Festival), 85, 92–98, 106, 116, 136, 156. See also intermediary roles: welfare organizations in south Tel Aviv

maleducación. See interactional directness Marshall, T. H., 5, 86, 199 media: Latinos de Hoy, 44, 47, 119, 120–133, 135n18; mediatization, 3–4, 5, 25n7, 162–163, 166, 170–173, 178–183, 186, 187, 190n27, 194–198. See also chisme (gossip); communicative circuits message, x, 24; campaign for citizenship, 156, 161–170, 173, 178–188; Eitan’s Fire Ceremony, 103–107; Escuelita’s Festival, 95–98; Immigration Authority, 142–149. See also citizenship: campaign for modernist chronotope, 32–33, 46–47, 49, 53n6, 67 modernization, 32–33, 38, 44–49. See also modernist chronotope

81n3, 133n3, 134n9, 166; strange, 5, 56–59, 63, 63–66, 71, 72–75, 79–80, 80n3, 122. See also stranger sociality Irvine, Judith, 81n7, 82n21, 115–117, 123, 127, 132–133 Israel: children (stereotype), 61; citizenship, 15–16; colonial history, 7–10, 18–20, 38, 137–138; economic neoliberalization, 8–9, 10, 12, 157, 159n28, 161, 163, 165–168, 169, 171–172, 174–177, 178, 180, 187, 188–189n7, 190n27, 197–198; race (ethnicity: Ashkenazi and Mizrahi), 15–16, 18–19, 23, 27n25, 28n34, 54n11, 42, 76, 86–87, 92; 93, 99–100, 102, 105, 109nn27–28, 144, 158n8, 167–168, 172–173, 183, 191n35, 192n49, 196; state of return, 15–16, 27n26, 165, 178, 185, 200n1. See also Hebrew; Israeli Scouts; immigration; Intifada; labor; language Israeli Scouts, 83–86, 98–107, 107n2, 109n3, 110n37, 163–168, 174, 179–182, 190n17 jefe. See intermediary roles: jefe

224 | Index nationalism, 24n2; anthropology of, 27n22, 29n42, 55n27, 118; Hebrew, 18; imagined community and public sphere, 23, 29n42, 55n27, 113–119; Israeli, 2, 84, 174–175, 196; and language, 17, 20, 81n9, 195–196; Latinos, 98, 187. See also Israel; language: ideology noncitizens, 7–11, 15–16, 17, 24n1, 25n9, 27n23, 30–56, 83–84, 90–91, 99–100, 105–106, 110n37, 112, 137–139, 142–149, 152, 157, 159n28, 161, 163–185, 188, 188n7, 191n38, 193n54, 196–198, 200. See also belonging; citizenship nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), x, 1, 8, 24, 37, 107n3, 117, 130–131, 146, 152–156, 156–158, 158n2, 160n30, 161, 163, 165, 166, 175–178, 184–187, 188n5, 191n28, 197–198. See also intermediary roles; Israel; ­liberalism Ong, Aihwa, 28n27, 163; graduated sovereignty, 4–5, 170–171 Palestinians, 1, 13–23, 25n9, 100, 137–138, 144–146, 157–158; campaign for citizenship, 163–165, 170–176, 180, 185; Israeli borders, 26n10; Latino engagement, 28n33, 29n41, 87; noncitizen labor, 7–11. See also Arabic; Intifada Peled, Yoav, 8, 18–19, 171 performance, 83–86, 93–103, 168 police. See Immigration Authority and Police police informers. See sapos (police ­informers) politeness. See educación (politeness, ­civility) publicness, 3, 5, 8, 19–24, 24n2, 25n9, 80n3, 83–86, 106–107, 111–119, 131–132, 134n9, 152, 158n7, 163–165, 176, 190n23, 194, 198; definition, 25n7, 29n42, 80n3, 114, 133n4; Latinos as immigrants, xi, 33, 36, 56–58, 93–95, 101, 107, 118–119, 129, 131, 152, 194–195, 200; national-Israeli, citizenship, and state, 7, 17–20, 81n5, 142, 144, 156, 159n16, 163, 165, 200; public claims and mediatization, 3–7,

85, 106, 112–113, 168, 171, 176–177, 194, 200. See also chisme (gossip); gender public sphere. See publicness racialization, 2–4, 13, 15, 25n6, 26n16, 28n27, 80n3, 169–170; history and sociology in Israel, 8, 15, 28, 54n11, 109n27, 109n31, 138, 183, 145, 157, 164, 172; of Latinos in Israel/ Palestine, 10, 13–14, 16, 20, 43–44, 54n11, 77–78, 84, 92, 96, 99–107, 138, 146, 170, 183, 187, 200. See also Latinos; Palestinians Raijman, Rebeca, 9–10, 15, 17, 27n20, 87 reflexivity. See language: reflexivity register (of language), 17, 20–21, 24n2, 53n4, 60–62, 82n13; formal-legal, 165, 176–178, 189n12; Hebrew and Spanish, 28n29, 59–61, 91–94; Latino immigrants, 57, 83–85, 105, 112, 126, 164–165, 168, 195, 200. See also intimacy; voice respect (respeto), 44, 51, 56–57, 60–61, 65–78, 81, 103, 141, 168, 171 Robinson, Shira, 16–18, 26n10, 27n26, 158n9 Rosaldo, Renato, 4 Rudeness. See interactional directness: maleducación rumor, 83, 100, 113–115, 118, 127, 134–135, 135n12, 140, 146, 152, 159n13, 159n24, 161–163, 172, 181, 183. See also chisme (gossip); language: evidentiality Salsa clubs, 46, 93, 108n16, 120, 129, 136, 150–151, 196 sapos (police informers), 6, 24, 133, 136–58, 158n3, 198; coercion/complicity, 24; state (communicative) circuits (by and with), 149–153, 158n8. See also state Sassen, Saskia, 10, 12, 54n9, 192n41 scouts. See Israeli Scouts; youth movements Shafir, Gershon, 8, 18–19, 171 Shankar, Shalini, 163, 169–70 Silverstein, Michael, 24, 29n40, 29n42, 53n4; entextualization, 107n4; footing, 60; 112, message, 134n5, 135n13, 135n23, 162; second order indexicality, 57; transposing voices, 82n19

Index | 225 sociolinguistic variation. See heteroglossia Space and time. See chronotope (space and time) Spanish, 49–52, 56–63, 83–92, 108n20; alegría (joy), 44–50, 195, 198; transcription, xvii. See also commensuration; educación (politeness, civility) state, 136–139, 141–149, 156–158; Israeli state, 1–4, 7–10, 14–18, 165, 171, 176–177, 181–185, 197–199; Latino engagement, 13, 83–90, 94, 149–153, 164. See also Immigration Authority and Police stranger sociality, 25n7, 31, 48–49, 56–58, 61–65, 80n3, 81n5, 139n9, 198. See also intimacy

uncanny, 2; definition, 191n29; insufficient similarity, 16–17; language ideology, 81n7; similarity, ix–x, 3, 18, 93, 147, 155, 161–164, 170–180, 183–188, 194, 196–197 unexpected citizens, xi, 1–2, 12, 20, 24n2, 51, 74, 163–164. See also belonging; citizenship; noncitizens Urciuoli, Bonnie, 13, 92, 156

Taylor, Charles, 113–114, 171 Tel Aviv: global city, 10–12, 22, 29n41; north-south geography, 84–89, 98–106, 147, 169 transnational, x; anthropology, 27n22, 29n42, 112; circuits, 11–12, 23, 35, 37, 140; educación, 66–72; intimacy, 57, 63, 72–75; Latin American, 31, 41, 58–59, 61, 108n15, 112, 118; media, 140, 159n13. See also nationalism Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 10

Warner, Michael, 80n3, 134n9, 159n14, 168 Wedeen, Lisa, 137, 158n7, 188n7 Williams, Brackette, 92, 156 Wirtz, Kristina, 107n5

voice, 3–4, 16–24; campaign for citizenship, 161–162, 181, 184–187; chisme, 111–115, 121–132; Israeli child, 71–75; Israeli state, 142–149; Israeli stranger, 56–57; Latin American parent, xi, 67–71, 79; stereotypes, 50–51, 58, 61–66, 82n13, 101–102

Yiftachel, Oren, 8 youth, x, 57, 59, 63, 75–80, 112; mediatization, 161–193; noncitizens, 8, 16, 157–158, 194–200; youth movements and organizations, 19, 83–86. See also Israeli Scouts; La Escuelita

ALEJANDRO I. PAZ is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto Scarborough.