Liquid Borders: Migration as Resistance [1 ed.] 0367696908, 9780367696900

Table of contents :
Contents
List of figures
List of contributors
Introduction • Mabel Moraña
Part I: Migration, (trans)borders, and the freedom of movement
1 Proliferating borders in the battlefield of migration: Rethinking freedom of movement • Sandro Mezzadra
2 Fugitivos de la Vida imposible: Transborders, migrations, and displacements • José Manuel Valenzuela Arce
Part II: Labor, politics, and the question of limits
3 Transmigrants as embodiment of biocapitalism • Abril Trigo
4 Refuge and deportation: The future as property in the border regime • Angela Naimou
5 At the border of sight: States, the civil contract, and Bracero Program photos • Deborah Cohen
6 Barbed wire: A history of cruelty • Tabea Linhard
Part III: Gender, art, memory, and the migrant
7 Mobile reorientations: Trans-agency and the queering of the Italian politics of migrant reception in Henrique Goldman’s Princesa • Elena Dalla Torre
8 Resilience beyond cruelty: Central American migrants pursuing the American dream • Ana Del Sarto
9 Border art for a border ecology • Ila Nicole Sheren
10 States of exile: Kracauer’s extraterritoriality, and the poetics of memory in Cristina Peri Rossi’s Estado de exilio (2003) • Ignacio Infante
Part IV: Colonial crossings/indigenous displacements
11 Early modern religious displacement and transnational Catholic subjects • Stephanie Kirk
12 Andean and Amazonian displacements: Culture and the effects of deforestation • José Antonio Mazzotti
13 Language of space: Politics of indigenous people removal and the ethnopolitics of resistance: The post-colonial diaspora • Stefano Varese
14 From genocide to Hieleras: The never-ending Maya genocide • Arturo Arias
Part V: Translocalities in Latin America
15 Bordering the crisis: Race, migration, and political strategies in anti-populist Ecuador • Jorge Daniel Vásquez
16 From the “suffering stranger” to the IDP: The emergence of a new problem area • Juan Ricardo Aparicio
17 Dispossession by militarization: Forced displacements and the neoliberal “Drug War” for energy in Mexico • Oswaldo Zavala
18 Migration and the aging body: Elderly war refugees in Brazil between national borders and social boundaries • Bahia M. Munem
Part VI: Global migration/Mediterranean crossings
19 Caribbean borderlands and traveling theories: Imperial frontier, translocal nations, federation of diasporas, planetary archipelago • Agustín Laó-Montes
20 Europe Otherwise: Lessons from the Caribbean • Manuela Boatcă
21 Visualizing the Black Mediterranean • Michelle Murray
22 “On behalf of vulnerable strangers”: Interpreting communities-to-come • Mina Karavanta
Index

Citation preview

Liquid Borders

Liquid Borders provides a timely and critical analysis of the large-scale migration of people across borders, which has sent shockwaves through the global world order in recent years. In this book, internationally recognized scholars and activists from a variety of fields analyze key issues related to diasporic movements, displacements, exiles, “illegal” migrants, border crossings, deportations, maritime ventures, and the militarization of borders from political, economic, and cultural perspectives. Ambitious in scope, with cases stretching from the Mediterranean to Australia, the US/Mexico border, Venezuela, and deterritorialized sectors in Colombia and Central America, the various contributions are unified around the notion of freedom of movement, and the recognition of the need to think differently about ideas of citizenship and sovereignty around the world. Liquid Borders will be of interest to policy makers and to researchers across the humanities, sociology, area studies, politics, international relations, geography, and of course migration and border studies. Mabel Moraña is Willliam H. Gass Professor of Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, where she is Director of the Latin American Studies Program. She has been Director of Publications of IILI (Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana) and has published extensively on Latin American literature from the colonial period to the present, including topics of cultural theory, literary and cultural criticism, and narrative and philosophy. She has edited more than 30 collective volumes and published 16 authored books, including Arguedas/Vargas Llosa: Debates and Assemblages (awarded with the Singer Kovacts Award, MLA, and the Premio Iberoamericano, LASA); The Monster as War Machine; and Philosophy and Criticism in Latin America: From Mariategui to Sloterdijk. Her book on migratory studies Líneas de fuga. Migración, frontera y sujeto migrante is forthcoming.

Routledge Research on the Global Politics of Migration

Globalisation, Migration, and the Future of Europe Insiders and Outsiders Leila Simona Talani Rethinking Security in the Age of Migration Trust and Emancipation in Europe Ali Bilgic Citizenship, Migrant Activism and the Politics of Movement Peter Nyers and Kim Rygiel Migration and Insecurity Citizenship and Social Inclusion in a Transnational Era Niklaus Steiner, Robert Mason, and Anna Hayes Migrants, Borders and Global Capitalism West African Labour Mobility and EU Borders Hannah Cross International Political Theory and the Refugee Problem Natasha Saunders Calais and its Border Politics From Control to Demolition Yasmin Ibrahim and Anita Howarth Liquid Borders Migration as Resistance Edited by Mabel Moraña

Liquid Borders

Migration as Resistance

Edited by Mabel Moraña

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Mabel Moraña; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Mabel Moraña to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Moraña, Mabel, editor. Title: Liquid borders: migration as resistance / [edited by] Mabel Moraña. Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2020044554 (print) | LCCN 2020044555 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367696900 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367696924 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Emigration and immigration–Social aspects–Case studies. | Emigration and immigration–Political aspects–Case studies. | Immigrants–Social conditions–Case studies. | Immigrants–Political activity–Case studies. | Boundaries. | Transnationalism. Classification: LCC JV6225 .L57 2021 (print) | LCC JV6225 (ebook) | DDC 304.8–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020044554 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020044555 ISBN: 978-0-367-69690-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-14291-1 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Contents

List of figures List of contributors

ix x

Introduction

1

MABEL MORAÑA

PART I

Migration, (trans)borders, and the freedom of movement 1

Proliferating borders in the battlefield of migration: Rethinking freedom of movement

15

17

SANDRO MEZZADRA

2

Fugitivos de la Vida imposible: Transborders, migrations, and displacements

27

JOSÉ MANUEL VALENZUELA ARCE

PART II

Labor, politics, and the question of limits

41

3

43

Transmigrants as embodiment of biocapitalism ABRIL TRIGO

4

Refuge and deportation: The future as property in the border regime ANGELA NAIMOU

57

vi

Contents

5

At the border of sight: States, the civil contract, and Bracero Program photos

69

DEBORAH COHEN

6

Barbed wire: A history of cruelty

84

TABEA LINHARD

PART III

Gender, art, memory, and the migrant 7

Mobile reorientations: Trans-agency and the queering of the Italian politics of migrant reception in Henrique Goldman’s Princesa

97

99

ELENA DALLA TORRE

8

Resilience beyond cruelty: Central American migrants pursuing the American dream

107

ANA DEL SARTO

9

Border art for a border ecology

120

ILA NICOLE SHEREN

10 States of exile: Kracauer’s extraterritoriality, and the poetics of memory in Cristina Peri Rossi’s Estado de exilio (2003)

131

IGNACIO INFANTE

PART IV

Colonial crossings/indigenous displacements

143

11 Early modern religious displacement and transnational Catholic subjects

145

STEPHANIE KIRK

12 Andean and Amazonian displacements: Culture and the effects of deforestation JOSÉ ANTONIO MAZZOTTI

157

Contents 13 Language of space: Politics of indigenous people removal and the ethnopolitics of resistance: The post-colonial diaspora

vii 169

STEFANO VARESE

14 From genocide to Hieleras: The never-ending Maya genocide

183

ARTURO ARIAS

PART V

Translocalities in Latin America

197

15 Bordering the crisis: Race, migration, and political strategies in anti-populist Ecuador

199

JORGE DANIEL VÁSQUEZ

16 From the “suffering stranger” to the IDP: The emergence of a new problem area

212

JUAN RICARDO APARICIO

17 Dispossession by militarization: Forced displacements and the neoliberal “Drug War” for energy in Mexico

224

OSWALDO ZAVALA

18 Migration and the aging body: Elderly war refugees in Brazil between national borders and social boundaries

240

BAHIA M. MUNEM

PART VI

Global migration/Mediterranean crossings

255

19 Caribbean borderlands and traveling theories: Imperial frontier, translocal nations, federation of diasporas, planetary archipelago

257

AGUSTÍN LAÓ-MONTES

20 Europe Otherwise: Lessons from the Caribbean MANUELA BOATCĂ

271

viii Contents 21 Visualizing the Black Mediterranean

289

MICHELLE MURRAY

22 “On behalf of vulnerable strangers”: Interpreting communities-to-come

303

MINA KARAVANTA

Index

315

Figures

5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 6.1 6.2 17.1

17.2 17.3 17.4

20.1 20.2 20.3 20.4 20.5 21.1

Braceros being fumigated with DDT at US border Aspiring braceros await selection, Mexico City Wife/mother hugging husband/son as he goes off on the bracero journey Husbands/sons and wives/mothers saying good-bye as men head off to the United States Official scrutinizes aspiring bracero’s hands Official checks future braceros for indications of physical weakness. Leonard Nadel, 1956 Clément Moreau, “An der Grenze” Clément Moreau “Ohne Titel” Images circulated in social media about the killing of eight alleged “sicarios” of the “Troop from Hell”, an armed group link to the “Northeastern Cartel”, later identified as civilians forced by state police agents to wear the military-style uniforms attributed to the group Map of alleged “influence” of “Los Zetas” Official 2016 map of government extractive infrastructure of natural gas Message by President Donald Trump from his personal Twitter account in response to the November 4, 2019, massacre of nine members of the LeBaron family – a Mormon colony established in the state of Chihuahua – blamed on “drug cartels” EU’s colonies on Euro banknotes Map of EU overseas countries and territories and outermost regions 2015 Map of the Caribbean with its European and U.S.-American colonial possessions Anguilla’s European borders Map of Europe with current Western Borders in the South America and the Caribbean Diallo protest at the plaza

70 74 74 75 76 77 85 86

227 231 232

236 275 276 278 281 283 294

Contributors

Juan Ricardo Aparicio, Professor in the Department of Languages and Culture, Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, currently teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses on critical theory in Social Sciences and the Humanities, on the Cultural Studies’ theoretical genealogies, and on those traditions of Latin American critical thought. Articulated to these theoretical trajectories are his research interests in the humanitarian government, development, internally displaced persons, social movements, the State, and the post-conflict scenarios in Colombia. He has been Chair of the MA in Cultural Studies between 2016 and 2018. His ethnographic research has been set in locations where both the experiences of traumas, forces displacement, and massacres converge with the new borders of capital accumulation and reterritorialization processes through the arrival of extractivist industries such as mining and agro-business in regions such as Mapiripán, Montes de María, Sumapaz, and Urabá. His work puts in tension the theoretical debates with the ethnographic interrogation on the everyday life, the problem of subjectivity, affects, and the question of the commons. Prof. Aparicio is a member of the editorial council of the journal Cultural Studies and the Board of the Association of Cultural Studies. He has received research grants from both the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological research and the Ford Foundation (Pre-dissertation Fieldworkd Award). With several colleagues, he is currently working on two research projects funded by the Universidad de los Andes: “Social Movements and the question of the commons in contemporary Colombia” and “Neoliberalism in Colombia: challenges and trajectories.” Arturo Arias, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Professor in the Humanities Department at the University of California, Merced, has been a Visiting Research Scholar in the Program in Latin American Studies (PLAS) at Princeton University in Fall 2019. He has published Recovering Lost Footprints: Contemporary Maya Narratives, Volumes 1 (2017) and 2 (2018), Taking Their Word: Literature and the Signs of Central America (2007), The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy (2000), The Identity of the Word: Guatemalan Literature in Light of the New Century (1998), and Ceremonial Gestures: Central American Fiction 1960–1990 (1998), as well as a critical edition of

Contributors

xi

Miguel Angel Asturias’s Mulata (2000). He is a past President of the Latin American Studies Association. Manuela Boatcă, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Institut für Soziologie & Global Studies Programme, is the author of the following scholarly publications: Global Inequalities beyond Occidentalism, Routledge 2016; “Caribbean Europe: out of sight, out of mind?” In: Bernd Reiter (Ed.), Constructing the Pluriverse, Durham: Duke University Press (2018) 197–218; Picker, Giovanni, Murji, Karim, and Boatcă, Manuela (Eds.) Racial Urbanities, special issue of Social Identities, 3/2018; Boatcă, Manuela, Komlosy, A., and Nolte, H. H. (Eds.) Global Inequalities in World-Systems Perspective: Theoretical Debates and Methodological Innovations, Routledge, 2017; “The centrality of race to inequality across the world-system,” Journal of World-Systems Research 23(2), 465–473; Modernity, Citizenship and Occidentalist Epistemology in Max Weber and Beyond, 2017. Deborah Cohen is Professor in the Department of History and also Director of Latina/Latino Studies at University of Missouri, St. Louis. She is the author of the book Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico (2011). The book received the Theodore Saloutos Memorial Book Award in 2012 and an Honorable Mention at the CLR James Prize for the Best Book in Working-Class Studies. It was also a finalist in the Weber-Clements Book Prize in 2011. Elena Dalla Torre, Italian, RLL, Washington University in Saint Louis, has a Ph.D. in French and Comparative Studies from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her teaching and research include gender and sexuality, cinema, queer feminist theory, transnational feminism, and more recently migrant and border literature and media. She has published among others on Carla Lonzi’s radical feminism (European Journal of Women’s Studies) and on the queer feminist politics of Dacia Maraini’s 1970s novels (Italian Studies). Her most recent article on Mario Mieli entitled “Transessualità Italian-style or Mario Mieli’s practice of love” appeared in a special issue of TSQ (2017), edited by Sheila Cavanagh. In 2015, she coedited with Vecchiarelli (editor) a volume on the cinema of Marco Tullio Giordana, where she authored an article on the ethical dimensions of migrant transnational European cinema. At Washington University, she teaches among others “Global Italy,” a course on the cultures of migration and interculturalism in literature. Ana del Sarto, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, The Ohio State University, is the editor of alter/nativas, latin american cultural studies journal (http://al ternativas.osu.edu/es/index.html). Among her publications are Los estudios culturales latinoamericanos hacia el siglo XXI, coedited with Alicia Ríos and Abril Trigo, special issue of Revista Iberoamericana, and The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader, coedited also with Alicia Ríos and Abril Trigo (Duke University Press). She has also published articles on Latin American discourses on criticism (literary criticism, cultural critique, cultural studies), on

xii Contributors the interdisciplinary relations between the Humanities and the Social Sciences, on contemporary Latin American women narrative, and on Latin American cinema. Her book Sospecha y goce: una genealogía de la crítica cultural chilena was published through Cuarto Propio, Santiago de Chile, in 2010. She is currently working on two book manuscripts: one on Latin American women writers, tentatively entitled, Irreverent Passions: On Writing and Affects, and the other one on violence, bodies, and subjectivities. Ignacio Infante is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Spanish and Associate Director of the Center for the Humanities at Washington University, St. Louis. Prof. Infante is the author of After Translation: The Transfer and Circulation of Modern Poetics across the Atlantic (Fordham UP, 2013). This book examines from a transnational and interlingual approach the role of translation in the transatlantic flow of modern poetry and poetics, and includes chapters on poets Fernando Pessoa, Vicente Huidobro, Federico García Lorca and the Berkeley Renaissance, Haroldo and Augusto de Campos, and Kamau Brathwaite. His second scholarly monograph, A Planetary Avant-Garde: Experimental Poetics, Transnational Literature Networks, and the Legacy of Iberian Colonialism (1909–1929), under contract with the University of Toronto Press (Toronto Iberic), is a comparative study of the poetic and sociohistorical features of key experimental literature networks emerging across the world during the Historical Avant-Garde, and their various responses to the colonial regimes of Spain and Portugal. Within the field of translation studies, he has guest-edited a special issue of the journal Translation Review (issue 95, 2016) on contemporary translational literature, as well as published book chapters included in Lawrence Venuti’s edited volume Teaching Translation (Routledge, 2017), and in Kelly Washbourne and Ben Van Wyke’s The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translation (2018, coauthored with Annelise Finegan Wasmoen). A literary translator, Prof. Infante has also translated into Spanish John Ashbery’s poetry collection A Wave/ Una Ola (Lumen/Penguin Random House, 2003), Will Self’s novel How the Dead Live / Cómo viven los muertos (Random House Mondadori, 2002), as well as cotranslated with Michael Leong into English Vicente Huidobro’s Skyquake: Tremor of Heaven. Mina Karavanta is Associate Professor of Literary Theory, Cultural Studies and Anglophone Literature in the Faculty of English Studies of the School of Philosophy of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. She holds degrees in English Language and Literature from the National and University of Athens (BA), and in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York at Binghamton (MA and Ph.D.). She specializes in postcolonial studies, critical theory and comparative literature, and has published numerous articles in international academic journals such as boundary 2, Feminist Review, Modern Fiction Studies, Mosaic, Symplokē, and Journal of Contemporary Theory. Her work has also appeared in edited volumes abroad and in Greece. She has coedited Interculturality and Gender with Joan AnimAddo and Giovanna Covi (London: Mango Press, 2009) and Edward Said and

Contributors

xiii

Jacques Derrida: Reconstellating Humanism and the Global Hybrid with Nina Morgan (London: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008). She has translated George Steiner’s Heidegger into Greek (Athens: Patakis, 2009), and Haris Vlavianos’s poetry into English, Affirmation: Selected Poems 1986–2006 (Dublin: Dedalus: 2007). She teaches in the undergraduate and graduate programs of the Faculty of English Language and Literature and the Interdepartmental Postgraduate Translation Program of the School of Philosophy of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She has also been invited to teach in the United Kingdom, the United States, France, Grenada in the Caribbean, and Cyprus. She is a founding member and coeditor of the peer-reviewed electronic journal Synthesis (synthesis.enl.uoa.gr) that promotes transcultural and interdisciplinary research and features international Editorial and Academic Boards. She has participated in international conferences and given invited talks in the United States, Europe, the Caribbean, and Australia. Stephanie Kirk is Professor of Spanish, Comparative Literature, and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, at Washington University, St. Louis. She is the author of two books, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the Gender Politics in Colonial Mexico (Routledge, 2016) and Convent Life in Colonial Mexico: A Tale of Two Communities (Florida UP, 2007). She is also the author of numerous essays on gender and religious life, and the editor of two collected volumes, Religious Transformations in the Early Modern Americas (Penn Press, 2014) and Estudios coloniales en el siglo XXI: Nuevos itinerarios (IILI, 2011). She is the editor of Revista de Estudios Hispánicos. Agustín Laó-Montes has a Ph.D. in Sociology from the State University of New York at Binghamton. His fields of specialty include world-historical sociology and globalization, political sociology (especially social movements and the sociology of state and nationalism), social identities and social inequalities, sociology of race and ethnicity, urban sociology/community-university partnerships, African Diaspora and Latino Studies, sociology of culture and cultural studies, and contemporary theory and postcolonial critique. Some of his books are Mambo Montage: The Latinization of New York City (coedited with Arlene Dávila, Columbia University Press, 2001); Technofuturos: Critical Interventions on Latino Studies (coedited with Nancy Mirabal 2007); Global Hegemony, States, and Antisystemic Movements: Politics and the Political in the Late Modern World-System (coedited with Joya Misra, 2007); and WorldCities and World-Regions: New Constellations of Political, Economic, and Cultural Power (coedited with Ramón Grosfoguel, 2007). Tabea Linhard, Department of Romance Languages, Washington University in St. Louis, is the author of Jewish Spain: A Mediterranean Memory (Stanford University Press, 2014) and Fearless Women in the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War (University of Missouri Press, 2005), and the coeditor of Mapping Migration, Identity, and Space (Palgrave, 2018) and Revisiting Jewish Spain in the Modern Era (Routledge, 2013). Her current projects include Unexpected Routes: Exile, Geography, and Memory (1931–1945), a

xiv

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book-length study of the different forms of displacement that shaped cultural production emerging from the Spanish Civil War and World War II in relation to the paths to safety that spread across the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. This project looks at a number of European writers whose itineraries involved Spain, Mexico, and North Africa, and that up until this point have not been discussed in relation to one another. She received an ACLS Fellowship to complete this project. José Antonio Mazzotti, Department of Romance Studies at Tufts University, is currently the King Felipe VI of Spain Professor of Spanish Culture and Civilization. He is also President of the International Association of Peruvianists since 1996, Director and Chief Editor of the Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana since 2010. Prof. Mazzotti has published Coros mestizos del Inca Garcilaso: resonancias andinas (Lima, 1996), Poéticas del flujo: migración y violencia verbales en el Perú de los 80 (Lima, 2002), Incan Insights: El Inca Garcilaso’s Hints to Andean Readers (Madrid/Frankfurt, 2008), Encontrando un inca: ensayos escogidos sobre el Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (New York, 2016), Lima fundida: épica y nación criolla en el Perú (Madrid, 2016), and The Creole Invention of Peru: Nation and Epic Poetry in Colonial Lima (New York, 2019). He is the author of 11 volumes of poetry and over 80 articles on Latin American colonial literature and contemporary poetry. He has edited Agencias criollas: la ambigüedad “colonial” en las letras hispanoamericanas (Pittsburgh, 2000), “Discurso en Loor de la Poesía” Estudio y edición, by Antonio Cornejo Polar (Berkeley, CA, 2000), Renacimiento mestizo: los 400 años de los Comentarios reales (Madrid/Frakfurt, 2010), Crítica de la razón heterogénea: textos esenciales de Antonio Cornejo Polar (Lima, 2013), Argos Arequipensis: libro de homenaje a Raúl Bueno Chávez (Boston, 2014), among others. He has co-edited Tradición oral iskonawa (Boston, 2018), Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities (Chapel Hill, NC, 2009), The Other Latinos: Central and South Americans in the United States (Cambridge, MA, 2007), Edición e interpretación de textos andinos (Madrid/Frankfurt, 2000), Asedios a la heterogeneidad cultural. Libro de homenaje a Antonio Cornejo Polar (Philadelphia, 1996), among others. He received the International Poetry Prize “José Lezama Lima” from Casa de las Américas, Cuba, in 2018, for his book El zorro y la luna: poemas reunidos. Sandro Mezzadra, Universitá di Bologna, Italy, is an internationally recognized scholar who teaches political theory at the University of Bologna and is adjunct research fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society of Western Sydney University. He has been visiting professor and research fellow in several places, including the New School for Social Research (New York), Humboldt Universität (Berlin), Duke University, Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme (Paris), University of Ljubljana, FLACSO Ecuador, and UNSAM (Buenos Aires). In the last decade, his work has particularly centered on the relations between globalization, migration, and political processes, on contemporary capitalism, as well as on postcolonial theory and criticism. He

Contributors

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is an active participant in the “post-workerist” debates and one of the founders of the website Euronomade (www.euronomade.info). His contributions include Diritto di fuga. Migrazioni, cittadinanza, globalizzazione (“The right to escape: Migration, citizenship, globalization,” ombre corte, 2006); La condizione postcoloniale. Storia e politica nel presente globale (“The postcolonial condition: history and politics in the global present,” ombre corte, 2008); In the Marxian Workshops: Producing Subjects (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018). With Brett Neilson, he is the coauthor of Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (Duke University Press, 2013) and The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2019). Bahia M. Munem, Department of Women, Gender, and Sexualities Studies, Washington University in St. Louis, received her Ph.D. in Women’s and Gender Studies from Rutgers University. Her scholarship brings together the fields of Latin American and Middle East Studies by examining, through ethnography, forced transnational migration, diaspora, and gendered and racialized modes of belonging in Brazil and the Americas. Michelle Murray is Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Vanderbilt University. Her research interests are rooted in contemporary Spanish literature and film and informed by the intersectional fields of women and gender studies, decolonial studies, and critical race studies. Her first book Home Away from Home: Immigrant Narratives, Domesticity, and Coloniality in Contemporary Spanish Culture (UNC Press for North Carolina Studies in Romance Languages and Literatures, 2018) studies representations of immigrant women as domestic workers in contemporary Spain. She is currently working on another book project tentatively entitled Migrant Markets; this book explores migration, political economy, and trafficking in the Southern Mediterranean in the twenty-first century. Angela Naimou, English Department, Clemson University, NC, is coeditor of the international human rights journal Humanity. Her book Salvage Work: U.S. and Caribbean Literatures Amid the Debris of Legal Personhood (2015) won the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) Book Prize and received Honorable Mention for the MLA’s William Sanders Scarborough Award. She is currently working on a book project, “Refugee Futurity: Global Forms of Refuge and Refusal,” which examines how writers reconceptualize migration and international border regimes. She is also editing a volume on the concept of diaspora in literature. In addition to coediting Humanity, Prof. Naimou serves at Treasurer of ASAP and is Associate Editor of the journal Contemporary Literature. Ila Nicole Sheren, Ph.D. from MIT’s Department of Architecture, is Professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Washington University, St. Louis. She specializes in contemporary political art, and is the author of Portable Borders: Performance Art and Politics on the US Frontera since 1984 (2015). She has published articles in such journals as GeoHumanities

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and the Journal of Borderlands Studies. Ila’s work focuses on the idea of borders as generative cultural and geopolitical sites, as well as zones that complicate the notion of established binaries. Her current research project, Border Ecology: Digital Art and Environmental Crisis at the Margins, argues for a reading of identity politics into contemporary digital eco art, but from a process of identification rather than a static essentialism. She has received support from the Mellon Foundation, the University of Toronto’s Jackman Humanities Institute, the University of Minnesota’s Institute for Advanced Study, and the Center for the Humanities at Washington University, St. Louis. Abril Trigo is Distinguished Humanities Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Ohio State University. He has published extensively on Latin American cultural studies, with particular emphasis on the historical formation of national imaginaries and their articulation to popular cultures, the politics of memory and identity, transnational migration, and the politico-libidinal global economy. His publications include Caudillo, estado, nación. Literatura, historia e ideología en el Uruguay (1990), ¿Cultura uruguaya o culturas linyeras? (Para una cartografía de la neomodernidad posuruguaya) (1997), Memorias migrantes. Testimonios y ensayos sobre la diáspora uruguaya (2003), The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader, coauthored with Ana Del Sarto and Alicia Ríos (2004), and Crisis y transfiguración de los estudios culturales latinoamericanos (2012). Currently, he is working on a theoretical inquiry on the formation of value and subjectivities under biocapitalism, tentatively titled Capital & Libido. He is a member of the Editorial Committee of alter/nativas, journal of Latin American cultural studies and editor of alter/nativas ebooks. José Manuel Valenzuela Arce, Colegio de la Frontera Norte, Tijuana, is an internationally recognized scholar specialized in topics of migration, US/Mexican borders, youth cultures, violence, and border politics. José Manuel Valenzuela Arce works as a research professor at the Departamento de Estudios Culturales, COLEF. His works are considered a groundbreaking and indispensable contribution to the understanding of sociocultural processes that take place at the Mexico/US border, as well as for the analysis of youth movements in Latin America and the United States, where Prof. Valenzuela is recognized as a solid and innovative critical voice. In 2017, Prof. Valenzuela became a fellow at the Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos Avanzados en Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales (CALAS) in recognition of his distinguished academic work and his contributions to the field of Latin American studies. In 2005, he received the Guggenheim Fellowship, in recognition of his notorious international trajectory. In 2001, he received the Internacional Prize from Casa de las Américas, for his book Jefe de jefes. Corridos y narcocultura en México. His most recent publications include Caminos del éxodo humano, Coord. (2019) and Trazos de sangre y fuego. Bio-necropolítica y juvenicidio en América Latina (2018). He has also coordinated the following volumes: Cultura, migración y desarrollo, Coord. (2018), Precariedades, exclusiones y emergencias. Necropolítica y sociedad civil en América Latina, Coord. w/ Mabel Moraña (2017), Migración

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y Cultura (2016), Juvenicidio. Ayotzinapa y las vidas precarias en América Latina y España, Coord. (2015); and El sistema es antinosotros. Culturas, movimientos y resistencias juveniles (2015). Stefano Varese is an Italian/Peruvian anthropologist, Professor Emeritus of Native American Studies at UC Davis, and former director and founder of the Indigenous Research Center of the Americas-IRCA. His research began in the Peruvian Amazon in the mid-1960s with the publication of his book Salt of the Mountain: Ashaninka Resistance and Utopia in Amazonia (five Spanish language editions, one English translation, and one French translation). In 1975, he left Peru for Mexico where he was appointed principal investigator in the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH). He was later appointed Director of the Unit of Popular Cultures and Indigenous Peoples in Veracruz and Oaxaca. In the late 1980s, he moved to California where he taught at UC Berkeley and Stanford University. In the early 1990s, Varese was hired as Professor in the Department of Native American Studies. His contributions include Las minorías étnicas y la comunidad nacional (Ethnic Minorities and National Community) (1974); Proyectos étnicos y proyectos nacionales (Etnic Projecta and National Projects) (1983); Indígenas y educación en México (Indigenous Peoples and Education in Mexico) (México, 1983); Pueblos indios, soberanía y globalismo (Indigenous Peoples, Sovereignty and Globalization) (1996); coedited with Sylvia Escárcega, La ruta mixteca. El impacto etnopolítico de la migración transnacional de los pueblos indígenas de México (The Mixtecs Journey: Ethnopolitical Impact of Transnational Migration of the Indigenous Peoples of Mexico) (2004); Witness to Sovereignty: Essays on the Indian Movement in Latin America (2006), coedited with Frédérique ApffelMarglin and Róger Rumrril; Selva vida. Del extractivismo al paradigma de la regeneración (2013); Bonfil y la civilización del común. Crónica de un itinerario utópico (2013); and Antropología del activismo y el arte de la memoria (2018). Jorge Daniel Vásquez is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology of the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador (PUCE). He has Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He is also visiting professor in FLACSO-Honduras and Fulbright Scholar. His book Crítica de la Sociedad Adultocéntrica (PUCE, 2015) received the Isabel Tobar Guarderas Social Sciences Award in Ecuador. He has also authored the books Identidades en transformación: Juventud indígena, migración y experiencia transnacional en Ecuador (FLACSO-Ecuador, 2014) and Máquinas identitarias en disputa. Filosofía de la cultura y formas de vida en segregación (EUNA, 2014), and coauthored Economía Política del Conocimiento en el Sur Global. Universidad y Ciencias Sociales en Ecuador y Tanzania (PUCE, 2020). Oswaldo Zavala is Professor at the College of Staten Island/The Graduate Center, CUNY, NY. His work explores post-national imaginaries, representations of violence at the US-Mexico border, and the exhaustion of discourses of modernity in the Latin American narrative of the last two decades. He is the author of

xviii Contributors Los cárteles no existen. Narcotráfico y cultura en México (2018), Volver a la modernidad. Genealogías de la literatura mexicana de fin de siglo (2017), and La modernidad insufrible. Roberto Bolaño en los límites de la literatura latinoamericana contemporánea (2015). He also coedited with Viviane Mahieux, Tierras de nadie. El norte en la narrativa mexicana contemporánea (México: Tierra Adentro, 2012), and with José Ramón Ruisánchez, Materias dispuestas: Juan Villoro ante la crítica (2011). His article “Imagining the US-Mexico drug war: the critical limits of narconarratives,” obtained the 2015 award for Best Essay in the Humanities granted by Mexico Section of the Latin American Studies Association. He received an honorable mention in Mexico’s 2017 National Journalism Award for his essay “Nada que ver en la frontera del narco. Los imagentextos de Julián Cardona.”

Introduction Mabel Moraña

The metaphorical image of “liquid borders” captures, both visually and conceptually, the pervasive encounters between the massive fluxes of transnational migrants and the material and intangible obstacles imposed as proliferating dispositifs of border governmentality in the globalized world. As distributions and delimitations of land that emerged and functioned historically in close connection to the notions of property and sovereignty, with the goal of demarcating cultural, religious, and political domains, borders have traditionally provided a sense of order, limit, and restriction. Denoting power, as well as the capacity of enforcing exclusion, borders became, in both their materiality and their symbolisms, iconic elements associated with the ideas of frontier and confinement, reclusion and imprisonment. Historically, borders have also inspired disobedience, contestation, and transgression. Much more unstable than they appear to be, borders have always triggered disputes in which excluded subjects challenged the legitimacy and instrumentality of borders, arguing in favor of human beings’ right of movement, particularly when their survival is at stake. As it is well known, in contemporary times, particularly since the end of the Cold War and in correspondence with the transformations of late capitalism, the reinforcement of borders has intensified. If the period that followed World War II was considered “the era of the refugee,” the first decades of the twenty-first century are certainly disputing the title. The strengthening of national borders, as well as the effects of dehumanizing migratory laws, border regulations, and harassment of so-called irregular migrants, has become, since the 1990s, an increasingly Kafkaesque reality. On both land and sea, border fortifications, wire fences, electronic barriers, and intangible lines create painful and arbitrary distributions of life and death, affecting millions of individuals who, in a vast majority, come from cultures that were colonized by the nations that now close their doors to them. It is, then, necessary to recognize that this is a manufactured catastrophe that, in addition to its historic roots, has reached appalling heights as a direct outcome of globalization. The implementation of neoliberal politics and the consolidation of new forms of hegemony and marginalization have dramatically deepened social and economic inequality, political exclusion, and cultural invisibilization of “the wretched of the Earth.” As reported by the United Nations, more than 244 million

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migrants traverse the world today, desperately looking for a livable place that would give life a chance to exist, in a time/space of dignity, peace, and freedom. In the light of the reference to Franz Fanon’s pivotal work, it is worth emphasizing that we are facing here a racialized crisis that does not hide its real and deplorable face. The bodies of migrants that lose their lives in the crossing of the Mediterranean, around Australian coasts, in their transit from Africa, Syria, or Central America, in European soil or in the deserts or warlike zones that separate Mexico from the United States, or in islands and offshore refugee and deportation camps around the world, are not white. They represent the margins of the developed world, the residues of colonialism, the reserve army of cheap workers that feed the capitalist machinery, when they are “lucky enough” to be absorbed, even temporarily, by the work market in developed countries, until they become again inconvenient and redundant. We are confronting the effects of biopolitics, the consequences of biocapitalism, and its necropolitical outcomes, which have in the dynamics of migratory movements one of their most evident, massive, and devastating testimonies. All around the world, the use of militarized borders, electronic technology, fortifications, authoritarian rhetoric, communicational campaigns, criminalization of civil disobedience, devaluation of the other, naturalization of inequality, and racialization and dehumanization of irregular migrants constitute a myriad of tactics destined to contain bodies and discourage people from abandoning inhospitable lands and unbearable living conditions, in search for opportunities of survival in foreign territories. The right to remain at home, in the motherland or in the sites of choice, must be often sacrificed in order to survive local conditions of scarcity, violence, or ecological imbalances. At the same time, the “disposable” subjects who traverse the world looking to inhabit the interstices of the capitalist system constitute an invaluable repository for the sustainability of clandestine parallel economies in developed or semideveloped countries. They are ideal for working in maquiladoras, for subcontracting, and for employment in a variety of occupations where no minimal salaries and no social benefits can be claimed, such as seasonal rural labor and domestic work. For this reason, the constant “production of illegality” is big business around the world. One of the aspects of migratory studies that the reader notices from the beginning is the emergence of a new vocabulary which, in an attempt to capture the multifarious nature of the issues related to de/re/territorialization, border crossings, deportation, and forced displacements, incorporate transdisciplinary critical and theoretical categories, methodologies, and concepts that belong to the fields of ethnographical, sociological, and psychological analysis. This terminology contributes in different manners to orientate the analysis of new realities that surpass previous scenarios and require original approaches. Philosophy is recognized as one of the most important fields for the understanding of migratory issues, since it constitutes a domain that allows for in-depth reflections and debates on topics such as solidarity, tolerance, identity, and alterity, closely related to the processes of migration and eventual integration into new social environments. Ethical issues are inseparable from intercultural relations,

Introduction 3 and inextricably linked to questions of citizenship, sovereignty, human rights, territoriality, and humanitarianism. Linguistics adds the indispensable study of the role language plays in cultural encounters, as an element that is essential to the construction of collective identities. Needless to say, political theory and economics provide the necessary foundation for the understanding of aspects related to the distribution of wealth, the organization of financial exchanges at a global level, the role of the State, the manipulation of job markets through the strategies of privatization, flexibility, and outsourcing, and problems related to the disciplining and control of populations around the world. The progressive weakening of nation-States, the strengthening of entrepreneurial transnationalized business, the proliferation of supranational institutions, and the prominence of technological communications have profoundly changed the terms of the political game, which in modern times was defined around the notions of nationalism/internationalism, the centrality of the State, the functioning of political parties and unions, and the significance of national identities and territoriality. If both the Rights of Man and the Rights of Citizens could be engulfed in the same expression as a reference to the distinct ideological configuration of the civil entity – the citizen – defined as the subject of modern politics, today that motto alludes to two distinguishable, if not antagonistic figures, that are difficult to reconcile when it comes to the discussion of migratory issues, border enforcement, and human beings’ right of movement and relocation. The issue of creativity related to migration and borders acquires particular relevance in these scenarios. Visual arts, performance, film, photography, music, and literature contribute to integrating the language of affect, transcendence, and singularity in situations that must neither become naturalized nor turned into mere statistics, however necessary and useful these quantifications might be. Symbolizations are essential not only to show how collective imaginaries elaborate the issues of human displacement, violation of rights, State repression, nomadism, and inequality, but also for understanding how agency is constructed, thus turning victimization into social consciousness and political action. The chapters that compose this book originated in an international conference held at Washington University in St. Louis in October 2019, where the authors participated in intense debates on a large variety of topics related to migration and borders around the world. The comparative dimension of intellectual exchanges was key not only for the enrichment of regional analysis, but also for the understanding of the ways in which power operates globally, under the regimes imposed by late capitalism and biopolitical domination. It soon became evident that current debates illuminate not only our troubled and changing present, but also shed light retroactively on migratory practices that took place during colonial times, thus devastating indigenous cultures and making possible centuries of slavery and servitude. While some well-known terms need to be reconsidered and integrated under new light into the study of migration and borders (such as those of community, human rights, nationalism, and cosmopolitism), other categories open new

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avenues for the understanding of massive mobilizations and their social and political effects (e.g., transnationalism, global citizenship, transmigration, biocapitalism, displacement, extraterritoriality, and infrapolitics). A change of vocabulary, when substantiated by innovative analysis, indicates the modification of perspectives and positionalities, as well as of disciplinary practices and intellectual goals. In the same manner, crucial Marxist analysis of capitalist society, including the understanding of labor movements, the regimes of accumulation, the configuration of job markets, the dynamics of migrations and popular resistance, need to be complemented and updated today, taking into consideration the transformations of capitalism and the angles provided by the study of affect, subjectivity, biopolitics, race, gender, and community. In addition to this introduction, this volume has been divided into six parts. Part I, “Migration, (trans)borders, and the freedom of movement,” includes Chapters 1 and 2 that propose a clear framework for further discussions. Sandro Mezzadra in Chapter 1, a leading scholar in the area of migration, focuses on the freedom of movement versus the proliferation of borders, as an essential point of contention in current scenarios, where the right of individuals to mobilize and relocate themselves is obstructed in the name of the rights of the citizens to enjoy the benefits of development and modernization, and to exclude those who do not legally belong to the nation-State, even if they are immersed in life and death struggles for survival. The collision between the modern structures of political-administrative organization of the social and the new realities and challenges of a world transformed and polarized by globalization and late capitalism becomes a central point of contention. In these scenarios, migration reveals its real dimension as a social movement that brings into light the necropolitical nature and the antagonistic quality of governmentality. According to Mezzadra, “migration provides us with an effective lens to investigate the weakness and instability of the current global political conjuncture, and it can also contribute, in a powerful way, to the establishment of political coalitions capable of subverting it.” Migration constitutes, in fact, a battlefield where the “victims” show their capacity to develop political consciousness, agency, and praxis. José Manuel Valenzuela Arce, a key researcher in the field of Mexico-US border studies, in Chapter 2 provides a critical and theoretical approach to the analysis of Central American migration, focused on the strategies utilized by people in their hazardous migratory trajectories, the risks they encounter, and the solidarity and sense of community that sustains them. Valenzuela inscribes transnational, translocal, and cross-border mobilizations in the context of globalization, particularly with respect to processes of capital accumulation and variation of labor markets. He analyzes different aspects of migratory movements: the practice of caravans, the threat of narcotraffickers and mareros that interfere with migratory mobilizations, the policies implemented by US government in order to control these fluxes and maintain territorial surveillance, the dispositifs of social classification, and the proliferation of spaces of abandonment and precarization. In order to overcome dualistic perspectives, Valenzuela proposes a conceptual array of

Introduction 5 notions that allow for the focalization of interrelations, convergences, and hybridizations in border areas. Part II, “Labor, politics, and the question of limits,” offers four distinct approaches to the issue of migration. In Chapter 3, Abril Trigo introduces a theoretical discussion of the effects of biocapitalism in the globalized world, proposing that migratory movements clearly illustrate the subsumption of body, affect, mentality, productive and free time, desire (all of these understood as components of the human totality) by the capitalist machine, which exploits subjects through alienation, cheap labor, and other forms of servitude, in order to ensure the continuous reproduction of capital. Expanding the notion of biopolitics, biocapitalism constitutes, according to Vanni Codeluppi, an advanced form of capitalist economy, “a form that is characterized by its growing intertwining with the lives of human beings.” In Chapter 4, Angela Naimou works on the issues of refuge and deportation, focusing on the case of Iraqi nationals residing in the United States. Naimou defines deportation in terms of radical modifications of temporal and spatial coordinates: “Deportation can mean transformative loss, transformed future, a disruption in continued migration, interminable time held in detention, or it can mean impending death.” Historically associated with colonial domination, slavery, and other practices in which force is exerted on the body and mind in order to achieve the submission and exploitation of the other, deportation is a punishment that destroys territorial identification, community, and collective identity, alters feelings of belonging and memory, impedes self-recognition and identification of place and time, and interrupts the continuity of life and its projection into the future. Naimou associates the border regime with imperial debris that needs to be removed, so narratives of lost and borrowed time can be told and repurposed. The inescapable case of Mexico is a typical case for the study of migratory policies and border struggles related to the job market. In Chapter 5, Deborah Cohen focuses on the “Bracero Program,” which was implemented between 1942 and 1964, a period in which more than 4.5 million Mexican laborers were legally hired in the United States. In addition, a very significant number of illegal workers also crossed the border during those years in their attempts to find work in American fields. Through the study of photographs taken by American photojournalist Leonard Nadel (1919–1990) in California, Texas, and Mexico, between the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the following decade, and by “the Mayo Brothers” (five Spanish immigrants that also documented the Bracero Program), Cohen analyzes the ways in which the body of the workers was objectified and treated as a commodity, thus illustrating the strategies of biocapitalism and the processes of appropriation not only of men’s working force but of their subjectivities (emotions, desires, and identities). The author elaborates on the testimonial value of this corpus, which exposes the abusive working conditions imposed on the Mexican laborers through perspectives that recuperate elements of gender, class, and race that were essential part of this historical experience. In a necessary approach to the materiality of borders, In Chapter 6, Tabea Linhard deals with aspects related to the construction of fences and in particular

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of wire fencing, an implement that has a long history associated with the defense of private property and the practice of repression and exclusion. Chapter 6 follows some key moments of the history of this rudimentary yet prominent dispositif for the enforcement of boundaries around the world. Linhard analyzes a series of images that convey some of the uses and meanings of this element that dehumanizes the human beings it is supposed to contain or exclude, just by imposing the aggressiveness of thorns and wire to the vulnerability of the body. As Linhard indicates, wire fencing encloses animals as well as human beings, memories, and dreams. Associated today with border scenarios and deportation camps, and, even before, with the horrors of the Holocaust, barbed wire will be forever related to the question of human rights and the oppositions between us and them, inside and outside, life and death. Part III, “Gender, art, memory, and the migrant,” includes Chapters 7–10. Most of these chapters have in common focused on subjects whose difference (in sexuality, age, gender, and race) intensifies their vulnerability during the challenging processes of des/re/territorialization. In Chapter 7, Elena Dalla Torre refers to the fact that, as noted by critics, the “hetero-centricity of human rights standards” and the “hetero-centric frame of humanitarian intervention” have invisibilized, until now, the sexuality of migration. Consequently, when it comes to the depiction of issues related to sexual preferences, prostitution, queer subjectivities, etc., symbolic representations usually rely on stereotypical figurations, conceptual oversimplifications, and sentimentality. Dalla Torre analyzes Henrique Goldman’s Princesa (2001), a filmic adaptation of the testimonial story of an Afro-Brazilian transgender sex-worker, a production that came out in Italy during the scandalous presidency of Silvio Berlusconi. Fernanda Farias de Albuquerque, the protagonist of the film, first identified herself as a transvestite, a declaration that triggered social and political persecution. Based on the elements provided by this case, Dalla Torre analyzes the notion of differential inclusion, the conditions related to sexuality imposed on asylum-seekers in different countries, and the specific situation of subjects with alternative sexualities, who become the target of particular forms of biopolitical discrimination and invisibilization. This chapter alerts us about zones of discrimination, invisibility, and further dehumanization that exist in the already vulnerable space of migration. In Chapter 8, Ana del Sarto focuses on women and children who are part of Central American migratory movements, a topic also approached in Chapter 14 by Arturo Arias in this volume. As in the case studied by Della Torre, women and children constitute “the weakest link” in migratory movements. Del Sarto studies the hardships and abuses they endure particularly in their transit through Mexico, and later on, if they manage to succeed in their border crossing, during the periods of precarious integration in the US job market. Through a series of documents, testimonies, statistics, narratives, and films, Del Sarto provides a comprehensive approach to the conditions of living that motivate large sectors of the Central American population to emigrate. Her chapter reviews the strategies that women develop in order to resist and persevere in their attempts to open up new horizons

Introduction 7 for them, their families, and the communities that survive thanks to the migrants’ remittances. In the field of literature, in Chapter 10, Ignacio Infante elaborates the topic of exile as resistance, in connection to Uruguayan writer Cristina Peri Rossi’s “poetics of memory” as expressed in her poetry book Estado de Exilio” (2003). Following the notion of extraterritoriality proposed by German critic Siegfrid Kracauer, Infante explores questions of space, time, subjectivity, imagination, and remembrance as a lyric constellation that elaborates the feelings of estrangement and nostalgia that characterize the experience of deterritorialization and accompany the processes of relocation and integration in a new reality. The rupture of continuity and familiarity goes hand in hand with the layering of temporalities and spatial dimensions. Experiences, meditations, cognitions, and feelings create a complex psychological and affective “state of exile” that can only be understood against the backdrop of displacement and suspension of freedom imposed by authoritarian regimes. A different but connected area of study deals with issues of territoriality, memory, border crossing, and death, as represented by art. Aesthetic representation incorporates affective perspectives by inscribing them in conceptual contexts that allow for a political understanding of human displacements and their impact on individuals and communities. Nature usually plays an important role in the depiction of transit, migration, and borderscapes, as illustrated by Ila Sheren in her Chapter 9. The border as boundary, frontier, limit, and horizon conveys meanings of fear, courage, and hopefulness that are in dialogue with objective conditions that interfere with migrants’ journeys to the North. The materiality of migration, illustrated by the interposition of topographical impediments (mountains, rivers, deserts), the rigors of climate, and the solidity of border fortifications and technological dispositifs, contrasts with the rudimentary paraphernalia of the migrant, the scarcity of resources, and the insecurity and uncertainty of their journeys. Sheren appeals to the idea of “border ecology” not only as a reflection on the role and conditions of the environment, but also as the possible connection with other epistemic forms (non-human, non-Western) that counterbalance traditional hierarchies. A distinct area of this ample exploration of deterritorialization is represented in Part IV, “Colonial crossings/indigenous displacements,” where the protagonists of migration belong to social and historical contexts different from ours. This section provides, for this reason, valuable historical and geocultural density and diversification to our multilayered approach to contemporary migration, demonstrating the continuity of transcultural and transcontinental diaspora along the centuries, in a variety of environments. In Chapter 11, Stephanie Kirk refers to the religious displacements that took place in the sixteenth century following the European Reformation. Considered a moment of “social purification,” religious migration had profound impact on both the practice of faith and the configuration of ecclesiastical communities. Kirk follows the mobilization of Catholic refugees from England and Ireland to the Iberian Peninsula, as well as the Protestant migration to England. Europe became,

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in general, a space of refuge for those, clerical or not, who were fleeing from religious censorship. Far from acting or feeling as victims of ideological persecution, these migrants displayed religious and political agency, planning, in many cases, to return home as missionaries or educators, being considered, often times, as martyrs who had endangered their lives in exile for the defense of the true religion. The study of specific cases shows the relationship established at the time between migrancy and martyrdom, an articulation that emphasizes the connection between faith and the body: both the individual, physical body suffering the detachment from the motherland, and the social and ideological body of religious communities, whose material and symbolic territoriality was threatened by intolerance and exclusion. José Antonio Mazzotti and Stefano Varese focus on the topic of indigenous deterritorializations in Chapters 12 and 13, respectively. Chapter 12 deals with the practice of human relocation that has been common among indigenous communities even in pre-Hispanic times, and during the colonial period, for the purposes of food planning and political unity. As the natural occupants of what would become modern “zones of abandonment,” autochthonous peoples suffer today the rigors of precarity, climate change, deforestation, mining, logging, and other devastating actions imposed by the “civilized society.” Starting with references to the works of Guaman Poma, Cieza de León, and other figures of the colonial period, Mazzotti traces a genealogy of indigenous displacements in the Andes, and of other migratory currents that nurture the multicultural society in the region. At the same time, internal migrations, mainly from the mountains to the coasts, have been key, particularly in Peru, for the reconfiguration of social and economic structures. Extractivism and other projects of appropriation and exploitation of jungle lands have had devastating effects not only on the environment but also on the indigenous cultures, whose languages and knowledge are losing the battle against the onsets of capitalism. As for Varese’s critical study, it concentrates on the effects of colonialism on indigenous cultures, particularly in Mexico, and on the strategies of resistance developed by those communities. Through the example of what Varese calls “the Oaxaca paradigm,” the anthropologist analyzes how members of autochthonous communities that embark on transnational migration to the United States in order to survive still manage to participate in agricultural and ceremonial activities by practicing seasonal cycles of return to their land. This allows them to maintain what Varese calls “distant belonging” and to defend the lands that have for them ancestral and political meaning. The recognition of territorial jurisdiction over lands to indigenous communities continues to be a problem in most Latin American countries. Varese asks a key question: “What political institution (national, international, global) is accountable for the safeguard of the indigenous people rights to sovereignty?” Given the profound significance of land for indigenous peoples, displacement and diaspora constitute a deep rupture of their practices, their experiences, and their imaginaries, not to mention a threat to the survival of their culture and their vulnerable lives. The notions of “zones of abandonment” (Foucault) and “economies of abandonment” (Aparicio) used by other authors can be applied to Arturo Arias’

Introduction 9 reflections (Chapter 14) on the continuous exiles, migrations, and diaspora of indigenous peoples from Guatemala, a country that has been shattered by devastating violence since colonial times. Starting in the sixteenth century, Arias traces “the historical arch that unites the catastrophe endured by Mesoamerica’s Maya population in the 1520s with the present juncture.” In so doing, the critic analyzes the theoretical productivity of the notions of agency and “life world” (Mbembe), in order to determine how to incorporate critical models into the analysis of the particular and intricate cultural history of Maya societies. In addition, in order to interpret historical processes of deterritorialization of Guatemalan indigenous population, Arias explores the relevance of the distinction suggested by Nelson Maldonado-Torres between the concepts of “crisis” (a critical situation in which “something of value can still be rescued”), “disaster” (when nothing can be corrected to improve the situation), and “catastrophe” (where uncontrollable damages cannot be reversed, thus demanding measures of radical transformation of reality). In a reflection on the currency of necropolitics and the pervasive use of necropower, Arias indicates that nowadays Mayas “no longer struggle for autonomy … they fight to prevent their extinction. … The colony is now everywhere.” Part V, “Translocalities in Latin America,” offers a range of studies that concentrate on regional migrations. The regions analyzed here have in common their constant mobility, their geocultural cohesiveness, and their difficult sociopolitical processes toward development and modernization. Many of the current impediments for the achievement of democratization and equality originated in colonialism and perpetuated after the processes of independence, ingrained in the fabric of national cultures. Dictatorships and internal struggles, produced in the nations unstable economies and adverse political conditions, deepened precariousness and systemic violence. “Economies of abandonment” is one of the terms used to address the social effects of these complex scenarios, where migration and internal and transnational displacements play a key role. In Chapter 15, Jorge Daniel Vásquez effectively connects migration and racism, focusing on the essential distinction between difference and inequality, as well as on the deliberate “production of difference” as a mechanism for ensuring the preservation of social hierarchies and political control. Etienne Balibar uses the concept of “differential racism,” which refers to the naturalization of discrimination as difference. If we analyze the role racism plays in the conceptualization and configuration of borders, we must conclude, with Mbembe, as interpreted by Vásquez, that the border is not a segregated place to inhabit, but a way of proposing [the] end [of entire populations]. If the border no longer designates a place, it does assign an identity, a race, producing a racial difference on which the creation of the communities of separation rests. The critic studies political processes in Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia, and Ecuador in which “mechanisms of differentiation and political violence” promote the accentuation of inequality. Social injustice, dehumanization, and devastation of the

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environment expose the necropolitical logic of capitalism, as well as its articulation with race and labor, both at central and peripheral levels. Also in the direction of an economic, political, and ideological critique of capitalism, Juan Ricardo Aparicio analyzes in Chapter 16 the situation of the internally displaced population in Colombia and the humanitarian mechanisms used to assist millions of people who have been expelled by different types of violence from their lands. As Aparicio indicates, the space of humanitarianism is in itself a site of contention that needs to defend its own autonomy from the pressures and interests of the State and other forces that still actively operate at social and political levels in the country. At the same time, the effect of the humanitarian dispositif cannot be disassociated from the issues of impunity, social justice, and equality and also from the complicated network of institutional interests, at local, national, and international levels. In spite of its uniqueness, the case of Colombia is still representative of a series of problems and processes that, with variations, are taking place all over the world. This demonstrates that the challenges presented by massive migrations and displacements are just starting to surface in a globalized world. In Chapter 17, Oswaldo Zavala situates his analysis of Mexican migration in the wider scenario of neoliberal State violence. He pays particular attention to the biopolitical strategies oriented toward the appropriation of natural resources in communal lands. Zavala argues that both the “war on drugs” and the practice of militarization have been used by the Mexican government as mechanisms that prompt internal and international displacements, thus facilitating different forms of extractivism (oil, natural gas, mining). Turned into a battleground razed by the forces of organized crime and militarization, the national territory now confronts the effects of forced displacements, a phenomenon officially attributed to narcoviolence, which has received minimal official and academic attention. Zavala analyzes the connection between “land dispossession and forced displacement as neoliberal policy,” a convergence legitimized in the name of national security. Making the land an unlivable place triggers migration, a practice that ends up clearing out the lands, which then become available for State appropriation. In Chapter 18, Bahia Munem concentrates on another aspect of differential inclusion: that of old age and health in the case of irregular migrants applying for admission. She focuses on the criteria used for classification of candidates’ worthiness for admission in the United States and also in Brazil, when their cases are submitted for assessment. She uses the case study of ill and/or aging Iraqi and Palestinian refugees to analyze official discriminatory policies as well as migrants’ strategies of protest and resistance. Making reference to existing international agreements, and to the parameters used for the distinction between “desirable and undesirable bodies,” Munem reflects on the value assigned to lives that, due to some kind of physical disadvantage, cannot reciprocate with their productivity the benefits granted by receiving countries. Skills, education, youth, and good health are considered acceptable qualifications. The opposite condemns individuals to marginalization and rejection. As Munem demonstrates, even humanitarian efforts are permeated, to some extent, by criteria of selective assistance.

Introduction 11 In Part VI, “Global Migration/Mediterranean Crossings,” four studies analyze from innovative critical and theoretical perspectives. In Chapter 19, Agustín Laó-Montes focuses on Caribbean social formations, particularly the cases of Cuba and Puerto Rico, taking into consideration diasporic movements and their significance in a specific geocultural reality captured by terms such as archipelago, creolization, crossroads, marronage, transculturation, and translocation. Following both Edward Said and María Lugones, the critic engages with the perspective of travel theories, which allows him to analyze migratory dynamics such as those of deterritorialization, relocation, and “long distance nationalism” (as per Benedict Anderson), as well as issues of “subaltern cosmopolitanism,” decoloniality, and trans-Americanism having functioned as “imperial frontier, planetary borderland [and] worldly crossroads,” the Caribbean represents “the first site of colonial modernity, as such constitutive of western capitalist modernity, primary referent for primitive accumulation, chattel slavery, conquest and colonization.” In Chapter 20, Manuela Boatcǎ makes a very necessary correction in the direction of European Studies, an area of inquiry that has traditionally neglected certain continental regions (East and South Europe), as well as European colonized territories in other parts of the world. Boatcǎ’s proposal is to leave behind the idea of “Europe” as a fixed and simplified geocultural referent, and to interpret it, rather, as a creolized space, a perspective that better captures Europe’s real significance in the globalized world. For Boatcǎ, in order to comprehend European transregional relations (both within the continent and between Europe and its colonies), it is essential to reconceptualize Europe’s cultural and political borders, which should encompass the colonial possessions in South America and the Caribbean. The critic offers a compelling alternative reading of European history in which the processes of colonialism, enslavement, and transcontinental migration that are traditionally disregarded in the study of the region are incorporated. A new concept of “Europeanness,” and of the connections between the idea of Europe and the European Union, emerges from this standpoint, which includes overseas territories, such as Azores, Madeira, the Canary Islands, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Réunion, and French Guiana, usually omitted by European Studies. The ideas developed by Boatcǎ about the existence of “unequal Europes” and around the notion of a creolized Caribbean Europe constitute a serious proposal for historiographical and political redefinitions and for the foundation of a decolonial perspective that reexamines the place of Europe in the global world. Still in the field of European Studies, but concentrating on the Mediterranean region and on the role that race has historically played in migratory movements, Michelle Murray in Chapter 21 develops an illuminating approach to maritime migration through the study of visual artifacts that allow her to discuss ideas of racial otherness and coloniality across the centuries. The critic provides a suggestive analysis of the iconic figure of slave trader Antonio López y López, which connects with the imaginaries and practices of colonial domination and racialized nationalism. The second element she examines is “The raft of Lampedusa,” a sculpture that represents African migrants on a very precarious boat, lost in the

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sea. A testimony of human devastation, abandonment, humanitarian crisis, and ecological destruction, this sculpture is part of the underwater museum located off the coast of the Canary Islands. “The Raft of Lampedusa” constitutes a compelling memorialization of the lives sacrificed in the black bodies of water that surround the European continent. In closing, Greek scholar Mina Karavanta’s contribution to Liquid Borders explicitly deals with the issue of ethics, a topic that traverses all the studies gathered in this volume. As Karavanta indicates in Chapter 22, the metaphors that have emerged worldwide as symbolic representations of migratory movements depict human mobilizations as natural disasters, flooding, or plagues, images that communicate a sense of inevitability, disgust, and dehumanization that permeate collective imaginaries and political discourses. In lieu of rationalization, responsibility, and ethical reflection, migration often inspires rejection, denial, and defensiveness. In other cases, efforts to document and analyze the dramatic situation of migrants, refugees, and displaced communities offer a counternarrative that not only demonstrates the political significance of migratory struggles as movements of resistance and as distinct displays of social consciousness and political agency, but that also gives evidence of the strategies of biocapitalism as a dispositif of global domination. Karavanta elaborates on the resignification of the European Union in postcolonial times, and on the persistence of its ethos of centrality, racialization, and exclusion of others as integral elements of neoliberal politics. Based on the documentary play titled “Case Farmakonisi or the Right of Water” (2015), centered on testimonies collected by Anestis Azas, Karavanta’s study focuses on a sadly representative event that took place in the South Aegean Island of Farmakonisi in 2014, when a boat carrying refugees capsized, while being redirected by the Greek Coast Guard to Turkish waters at a very high speed. The notion of life suggested in these situations returns to the concept of differential inclusion, since the absolute stranger challenges our beliefs in democracy and political representation. Karavanta notices that the migrant is too often reduced to an idealized, abstract, and decontextualized image, a “vague essence” (Nail) deprived of all materiality and singularity, whose voice is subsumed in the discourse of others. This critical piece leaves us with the responsibility of articulating and negotiating these options that are defining the world in which we live. Liquid Borders offers, then, a vast and rich array of critical and theoretical approaches to a number of issues related to migration, borderization, voluntary and forced displacements, exile, refuge, and related forms of human mobilization. The study of processes of de/re/ territorialization constitutes an invaluable point of entry for the understanding of crucial problems that originated in colonialism and were intensified by capitalist accumulation, neoliberalism, and globalization. Contrary to dismissive opinions, migration constitutes today a social movement whose mere existence destabilizes the notions and principles that were considered the pillars of modernity, such as the ideas of nation, national identity, civil society, sovereignty, nationalism, citizenship, and the like. For these reasons, massive human mobilization constitutes, without a doubt, one of the most dramatic,

Introduction 13 influential, and challenging occurrences of our time, an event that encompasses the domains of economic policies, political convictions, and moral consciousness. The studies gathered in this volume open routes of awareness in the most important areas of this field, a mine field, that we must traverse decidedly and persistently.

Part I

Migration, (trans)borders, and the freedom of movement

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Proliferating borders in the battlefield of migration Rethinking freedom of movement Sandro Mezzadra

Borders and migration have been for a long time at the center of my research and political agenda. And although the original focus of my work in the early 1990s was Italy, with its peculiar migratory history, I have been relatively quick to expand the scope of my research, in particular through my participation in research and activist networks first in Europe and then in other parts of the world, including North Africa, the United States, Australia, and India. How to make sense of the global dimension of migration, how to let it conceptually and empirically resonate even in the most grounded and local investigations, has been and continues to be a crucial question driving my own work. Latin America has been particularly important for me in this respect, and I am happy to say that a collective book I coedited with two Mexican friends – Blanca Cordero and Amarela Varela – has just come out in Spanish. In that book, América Latina en movimiento. Migraciones, límites a la movilidad y sus debordamientos (2019), we attempt to take migration as a lens to grasp wider processes that are reshaping Latin America as a whole, focusing in particular on the tensions surrounding its borders and on the proliferation of a set of heterogeneous boundaries within national and metropolitan spaces. This is a project quite close to the concept of this book. Our purpose here is to discuss “liquid borders,” with a specific focus on the issue of migration. And we are invited by Mabel Moraña to do something more than that, which means “to face our ghosts, name our fears and define, once for all, the world we want.” A quite ambitious program, indeed! And I must say that I like it. But let me start by saying that “liquid borders” is an image with multiple and ambivalent meanings. It definitely points to the mobility and heterogeneity of borders, which has been underscored and investigated in many ways within the field of border studies over the last decades. Far from being encapsulated by the solidity of a wall, which is only one possible instantiation of the border, borders are indeed quite elusive formations. Their multiple components, legal and geographical, political and cultural, linguistic and otherwise, are not necessarily bound together by a “line traced in the sand” (see, for instance, Mezzadra and Neilson). The cartographic representation of geopolitical borders as limits of a specific and discrete “national” territory, marked by a particular color on the world map, has been shattered and challenged by the increasing awareness of the relevance of processes and flows that traverse those limits without necessarily acknowledging

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their relevance and even legitimacy (see Cowen). Border control, in the United States no less than in the European Union, externalizes the operations of borders, involving neighboring as well as more distant countries and projecting the shadow of the border far away from the territorial limit they are supposed to embody (see for instance De Genova, Mezzadra, and Pickles, 73–77). A wide array of limits and boundaries crisscross national and metropolitan spaces, harnessing and channeling in a selective way the mobility of specific subjects through a variable economy of visibility and invisibility (see Balibar, “Uprisings”). Even more importantly, borders are constitutively contested institutions and fields of struggle; the challenge posited to them by people on the move makes their “solidity” nothing more than a claim (Mezzadra and Neilson). This is of course not to say that such “solidity” has no real manifestations, be it in the walls that proliferate in the world 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in the barbed wire, in the fences, or even in the more sophisticated digital technologies of control that curb, stop, or even destroy the bodily movement of migrants in many parts of the world. We need to carefully map such manifestations, and we need above all to take action against them – with any means necessary. Nevertheless, as Brett Neilson and I write in Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (2013), from a theoretical point of view, we cannot reduce the border to a wall; we need a more sophisticated framework to make sense of the complex interplay of inclusion and exclusion, of the high selectivity and flexibility that characterize the operations even of the seemingly most “solid” borders. Also, a unilateral focus on traditionally geopolitical borders can be misleading today, if we are to take seriously what Étienne Balibar (“We, the People”, 109) wrote 20 years ago speaking of the fact that borders – far from simply existing “at the edge of territory, marking the point where it ends” – “have been transported into the middle of political space.” This is again a movement that we have to follow, tracking the multiple metamorphoses of the border within the space it should simply circumscribe. The violence that is constitutive of the very concept of the border takes multifarious shapes in that process, as well as the challenges it continuously encounters. “Liquid borders” is therefore an image I feel at ease with, since it conjures up notions such as the mobility, flexibility, heterogeneity, and even elusiveness of borders. As I just said, these are for me important notions for the critical study of borders. But “liquid borders” also reminds me of the title of a video installation by Charles Heller and Lorenzo Pezzani (“Liquid Traces”) on the case of the so-called left-to-die boat that they investigated in the framework of the project “Forensic Oceanography” (Heller and Pezzani). A migrant boat sailed from Libya in March 2011 and drifted for 14 days in distress, notwithstanding the presence of NATO military vessels engaged in the strike against Gaddafi, which noticed the boat but did not intervene. Sixty-three migrants died aboard. From this point of view, “liquid borders” immediately refers to the operations of borders at sea, to maritime borders. Coming from Italy and being engaged both as a scholar and as an activist in several projects to support migrants in their travels across the Mediterranean, I am of course acutely aware of the relevance of such

Proliferating borders 19 a topic. There is a need to stress that, historically, borders are directly connected with the land. The ways in which the sea has been partitioned, legally and politically organized through the establishment of heterogeneous zones, overlapping jurisdictions, and corridors, are a crucially important chapter in the history of European empires. Historian Lauren Benton provides a fascinating account of that chapter in her A Search for Sovereignty (2010), while a recent special issue of the journal Global Networks (2019), edited by David Featherstone, further advances our understanding of the intertwining of maritime networks, oceanic spaces, and transnational class formation. As Heller and Pezzani, along with many others, contend, the liquid space of the sea has been in recent years a crucial field of experimentation with border control, with momentous implications also on land. The complex maritime spatiality composed of territorial waters, contiguous zones, exclusive economic zones, search and rescue (SAR) zones, and high sea, as well as the interlacing of heterogeneous legal orders in the maritime space, has been acted upon and manipulated by national and supranational actors of migration control (see Heller, Pezzani, and Stierl). While the Mediterranean is an obvious instance in this regard, one thinks here also of the “Pacific solution” in Australia (see Rajaram). In both cases, legal and political arrangements that target migrants at sea imply shifts in territoriality (apparent in the case of Australia, with the excision of remote territories from the country’s migration zone) and profound transformations in the migration regime. This is a point that should figure prominently in our research agenda on borders and migration. Mentioning the Mediterranean allows me to come more directly to the main question I want to address in this talk. Our conference takes place in hard times, and this is a circumstance that implies specific responsibilities we cannot escape. In Europe, after the summer of 2015 (the “long summer of migration,” as critical scholars and activists call it), we have been experiencing a hardening of borders and a renationalization of politics across the continent. Even Schengen borders (which means borders within the European zone of “free and unrestricted movement of people”) have been selectively closed from time to time. Border fences and walls proliferate across the so-called Balkan route, where hundreds of thousands of migrants had opened up a way toward freedom in 2015, challenging the European border regime. Viktor Orbán, the hyper-nationalist Hungarian Prime Minister and fetishist worshiper of walls and barbed wire against migrants, is not anymore isolated in Europe. Matteo Salvini, the Deputy Prime Minister in Italy until last August, has, for instance, followed his lead. One of the main slogans of the Brexit campaign, “Take back control of our borders,” is translated onto aggressive campaigns of the far right against migration in several countries, ranging from Spain to France, from Germany to Italy. Images of migrants tortured and detained in camps in Libya as well as of shipwrecks in the Mediterranean rarely spark public outrage and indignation. But such images tell us a lot about the predicament of migration in the current conjuncture, while humanitarian NGOs that operate at sea are criminalized and ports are often closed to ships that perform rescues of people in distress.

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Is it simply a European conjuncture? I would definitely not say that. You are all familiar with the situation in the United States, with ICE raids and efforts to further fortify the Southern border, with family separation, attacks on asylum, and bombastic rhetoric against migrants. But even beyond Europe and the United States, we are confronted today with a tendency toward the hardening of borders and the spread of racism and hostility against migrants. Think of South Africa, where racist attacks on migrants multiply and become ever more violent across the country. Think of the dramatic change of attitude toward migrants and refugees in Brazil in the age of Bolsonaro. Think of India, of the wild campaign against Muslim migrants from Bangladesh (dubbed “termites” by Amit Shah, the President of the ruling BJP), a campaign that is particularly virulent in such states as West Bengal and Assam (where the publication of the final version of the National Register of Citizens has recently stripped about 1.9 million people of their citizenship). Unfortunately, the list could easily go on. Is there a connection between such different instances of hardening of borders and criminalization of migration? I think that this is indeed the case, that they are all part – each one with its peculiarity – of the global political conjuncture we are living through. To put it shortly, this is a conjuncture characterized by a surge of nationalism in many parts of the world (including such important powers as Russia and China), and by the emergence of various degrees of combination between nationalism, authoritarianism, and neoliberalism. Migrants are among the first targets to be attacked in such a conjuncture, which implies the emergence of new formations of racism and sexism (and not by accident, women who refuse to abide by the patriarchal order are also immediately under attack). But precisely for this reason, migration provides us with an effective lens to investigate the weakness and instability of the current global political conjuncture. And it can also contribute in a powerful way to the establishment of political coalitions capable of subverting it. Speaking of migration today necessarily implies speaking of the more general political conjuncture we are living through in the contemporary world. Such political conjuncture is anyway far from stable, and there is a need to carefully investigate the heterogeneous tensions crisscrossing it. One could say for instance that the surge of nationalism we are currently witnessing does not fit in a smooth way the kind of production of space that is connected with contemporary operations of capital. Borrowing the terms employed by world system theory (see Arrighi), we could even say that we are confronted today with profound contradictions between “territorialism” and “capitalism.” The development of Trump’s “trade wars” with China may be an effective instance of that. Needless to say, the relation between territorialism and capitalism has never been smooth, but today’s capital deploys an unprecedented ability to produce its own spaces in a global perspective. Critical scholars of logistics, like Deborah Cowen and Keller Easterling, have recently emphasized this point, stressing the relevance of the web of supply chains, shipping routes, logistical hubs, infrastructural projects, cables, and data centers that build the skeleton of contemporary global capitalism. Although we know that capitalism is capable of mutating and adapting to completely different political “environments,” there are definitely powerful tensions

Proliferating borders 21 and contradictions between the logistical operative logic of contemporary capital at the global level and the current surge of nationalism. This is something that has important implications also for the field of migration. Over the last couple of decades, we have been critically investigating the border and migration regime connected with neoliberalism (see Hess and Kasparek). There has always been a tension within that regime between different logics, discourses, and actors, in particular between the economic valorization of migration and the primacy of security – a tension that critical scholars have often interpreted as giving way to an oscillation between biopolitics and “necropolitics,” to borrow a term introduced by Achille Mbembe. The economic valorization of migration, in any case, has always figured prominently in the actual working of what we can call neoliberal migration and border regimes. Often employing the notion of “human capital” (whose traces are apparent also in the “Global compact for migration”) to detect the “skills” and productive potential hidden even in tumultuous and ungovernable migratory movements, theories and practices of “migration management” have fostered a flexibilization and diversification of recruitment schemes (see Mezzadra). In very general terms, we can say that what drove the development of such schemes was the “dream” of a “just-in-time” and “to-thepoint migration” (Xiang). I was speaking before of logistics, and I can say now that such a model prompts what can be described as a logistical turn in migration management, according to a kind of delivery rationality. With different nuances, such logistical rationality was implemented in many parts of the world since the beginning of the 21st century. In a study I co-coordinated in Berlin with my friend Manuela Bojadzijev, we investigated the ways in which the million refugees who arrived in Germany in 2015–2016 (mainly although not exclusively from Syria) were put to work (or “integrated into the labor market,” as the official discourse has it). In our research, we demonstrated, for instance, the relevance of what I was calling the logistical turn in migration management, focusing in particular on the roles played by a panoply of heterogeneous agencies in the intermediation of the encounter between migrant labor and capital (see Altenried et al.). The German case is important here. The attempt to put hundreds of thousands of refugees to work was an amazing success from the viewpoint of the government and of the capitalist actors supporting it, a success certified by official statistics. It was the confutation of the rhetoric of emergence and threat that surrounded the refugees’ arrival in 2015. And nevertheless, that rhetoric has become more and more aggressive and loud in the following years, it has led to the contestation of such successful politics as the one I just mentioned, and it has even compelled Angela Merkel’s government to change them. Here we can see how the “nation,” or a specific form of nationalist rhetoric and politics, can become a limit to capitalism with respect to migration (and this is definitely not restricted to Germany). This is something we must remain aware of, since it is a defining feature of our global current conjuncture and predicament and a potential root of its instability. One can say that today in the working of border and migration regimes in different parts of the world, what I was calling before the “biopolitical” component has

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been obscured and displaced, and “security,” with its “necropolitical” implications, is the absolutely dominant logic. Nationalism and authoritarianism take “porous borders,” to recall a phrase often used by critical border scholars over the last two decades, as a symptom of a kind of lack in the nation’s body, as a wound that has to be healed through walls and barbed wire. A major shift is definitely signaled by the criminalization of solidarity and humanitarianism, instantiated by the attacks on a group like “No More Deaths” in Arizona, the indictment of French citizens for giving food and shelter to illegalized migrants, and the war waged by Italian governments on NGOs operating in the Mediterranean (see Smith; Tazzioli; and Tazzioli and Walters). I speak of a shift here because humanitarianism has long been part and parcel of the neoliberal border regime I have synthetically sketched before. The governmental turn of what Didier Fassin calls the “humanitarian reason” has been apparent in many parts of the world since the 1990s. Humanitarian actors have been incorporated into the working of the border regime, with implications that I have been criticizing along with many other scholars and activists for several years. I think this critique is still valid and relevant today, but I have always been aware of the fact that the incorporation of humanitarian actors into the border regime implied tensions within its working and the opening up of potential spaces for migrants and refugees (Mezzadra and Neilson, chapter 6). The criminalization of humanitarianism, which is currently a powerful although contested and far from smooth tendency, eliminates those tensions and closes those spaces. It definitely shifts the ground for the critique of humanitarianism. We have to start again from the “massacre of the human,” to put it with Frantz Fanon, that takes place in borderlands and in maritime border zones. And we have to link the claim for the right for non-state actors to intervene in such space to the movements and struggles of people on the move. We have to remember that, as African American thought teaches us since the 19th century, the experience of being human is absolutely peculiar in the case of people whose humanity is contested and denied by the violence of slavery and colonialism and their contemporary mutations. This is a fact that looms in a clear way behind the chant “We are human” in migrants’ and refugees’ rallies in many parts of the world. This is a claim that opens up the space for a rethinking of the very meaning of the “human,” challenging any paternalistic and even colonial understanding of humanitarian intervention. More generally, there is a crucial need to emphasize the subjectivity and agency of people on the move if we are to politically understand the stakes looming behind the tensions and conflicts surrounding many borders today. It is in this sense that I speak of the battlefield of migration (see also Mezzadra and Stierl). Too often we see only destitution and desperation, violence, “necropolitics,” and death at the border. We are right to describe such phenomena, of course, but in order to effectively criticize them, we have to emphasize the stubbornness, the amazing determination, the moments of individual and collective struggle of people in transit. It is this subjective stubbornness and even autonomy of migration that challenges the politics of control and composes a battlefield that reproduces itself well beyond the border – a battlefield that characterizes migration as such.

Proliferating borders 23 “La frontera está cerrada, pero vamos a pasar” (“the border is closed, but we will cross”). This is a phrase taken from a Honduran song circulating among migrants’ caravans in Mexico (“En caravana” by Chiky Rasta), which very effectively instantiates the “stubbornness,” which is constitutive of the current global battlefield of migration. It resonates with the chant “Freedom, freedom” that you can hear from migrants who successfully land in Europe – and indeed in many migrant rallies not only in Europe. The claim to be human is immediately linked with the claim to be free – to be more precise, with the claim for a freedom that is directly practiced in migration. I am not proposing any idyllic picture of migration; I do not forget that migration is crisscrossed by moments of coercion and violence, which are so apparent and tragic in the experience of migrants’ caravans and Mediterranean crossings. Nevertheless, I want to emphasize this other side, the subjective determination of migrants and the intensity with which they re-signify the basic notion of our philosophical and political vocabulary, such as being human and freedom. It is starting from such subjective aspects that we can begin to think about the roles that migration can play in the building of political coalitions capable of the struggle against the combination of authoritarianism, nationalism, and neoliberalism that characterizes the current political conjuncture. It is particularly the emphasis on freedom that can resonate with other movements and struggles that already today make such political conjuncture unstable and weak. I am convinced that today we must resist the temptation to frame the politics of migration in merely “defensive ways,” simply advocating the respect of human rights, of the rule of law, or of some kind of humanitarian standards. What is needed is a much more ambitious project capable of taking as its point of departure the claim and the material exercise of freedom by migrants and of developing all its implications in a wider political framework. What we need is a politics of freedom of movement. It is on such a politics that I would like to conclude my talk. As you know, there is a lively debate today surrounding the issues of freedom of movement and open borders, particularly in the United States. Allow me to mention a single book, Open Borders: In Defense of Free Movement, edited by Reece Jones, and a single paper, “The Case for Open Borders” by Suzy Lee, recently published in the journal Catalyst. The book edited by Jones gives a good overview of the discussion, while Lee’s paper is particularly effective in discussing the question of labor from the angle of open borders and migration. Freedom of movement and open borders have long been discussed in political and legal theory according to a unilaterally normative approach. The rigorous and influential work of Joseph Carens is a good instance of that. Today, we are witnessing a shift toward more nuanced approaches capable of taking into account the relevance of normative orders and at the same time of emphasizing the roles played in conflicts surrounding borders by material practices and interests as well as by a panoply of heterogeneous actors. Far from being imaginable as the result of the smooth development of a normative logic, freedom of movement emerges as a field of struggle and contestation, while several scholars emphasize the need to take its practice by migrants as a necessary point of departure. Such a shift has important implications also for the way in which we imagine

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the spatiality of freedom of movement, which necessarily becomes multi-scalar. While the national level remains important, the struggle for freedom of movement has clearly transnational moments (also considering the transnationalization of border control), while cities become strategic sites of action and experimentation, as solidarity, refuge, and sanctuary cities demonstrate in a contradictory but powerful way. What we need today, I want to repeat it, is a politics of freedom of movement, the capability to take the moment of struggle and claim it as a generative root of its productivity. From this point of view, freedom of movement must be further qualified, remaining aware of the fact that there are several liberal and even neoliberal formulations of freedom of movement following the blueprint of market freedom. In the situation I was describing before, characterized by tensions and contradictions between nationalist policies and capital even in the field of migration, I do not exclude the possibility of tactical convergences. But the politics of freedom of movement that I have in mind is, to put it in two words, decidedly anti-capitalist. Let me say on this point that I find highly questionable the use in some parts of the left (to be more precise: of the nationalist left) of the Marxian notion of the “industrial reserve army” to address the relation between labor and migration. Without going into the details, in such use a notion that was originally forged to blame capital is distorted and instrumentalized to blame migrant workers. Having said this, the problem of course remains that capital exploits migrant labor and is interested in having at its disposal a precarized and fragmented labor force, liable to be blackmailed. Again, the point is struggle; it is to develop a political reading of migration focused on rights and not on “flows,” to pick up the terms employed by Suzy Lee. A politics of freedom of movement cannot be separated by a politics of labor capable of valorizing the protagonism of migrant workers and of forging coalitions beyond any opposition between “autochthonous” and “foreign” workers. I know that this is a difficult project, but ambitious projects are always difficult and ambitious projects are what we need in hard times. The politics of freedom of movement that I have in mind can be operationalized in many ways, and there would be much more to say about its concrete articulations and the problems it raises. But let me conclude by saying that such a project cannot be only a migrant project; it cannot and does not address only migrants. Freedom of movement concerns the behaviors and desires of a multitude of subjects. And what we need to do is to collectively work toward the building of an imaginary capable of sustaining a politics of freedom of movement, of demonstrating that a society based on freedom of movement is more free, happy, and wealthy than society huddled in fear behind walls with militarized defenses. In a way, I understand also our conference as a modest contribution to that task.

Works cited Altenried, Moritz et al. 2017. Logistische Grenzlandschaften. Das Regime mobiler Arbeit nach dem Sommer der Migration. Münster: UNRAST-Verlag.

Proliferating borders 25 Altenried, Moritz et al. 2018. “Logistical Borderscapes: Politics and Mediation of Mobile Labor in Germany After the ‘Summer of Migration’”. South Atlantic Quarterly 117 (2): 291–312. Arrighi, Giovanni. 2007. Adam Smith in Beijing. London: Verso. Balibar, Étienne. 2004. We, The People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. Oxford: Princeton University Press. Balibar, Étienne. 2007. “Uprisings in the Banlieues.” Constellations 14 (1): 47–71. Benton, Lauren. 2010. A Search for Sovereignty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carens, Joseph. 1987. “Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders.” The Review of Politics 49 (2): 251–273. Carens, Joseph. 2015. The Ethics of Immigration. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cordero, Blanca, Sandro Mezzadra and Amarela Varela, eds. 2019. América Latina en movimiento. Migraciones, límites a la movilidad y sus debordamientos. Buenos Aires: Traficantes de Sueños – UACM – Tinta Limón. Cowen, Deborah 2014. The Deadly Life of Logistics. Mapping Violence in Global Trade. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. De Genova, Nicholas, Sandro Mezzadra and John Pickles, eds. 2015. “New Keywords: Migration and Borders.” Cultural Studies 29 (1): 55–87. Easterling, Keller. 2014. Extrastatecraft. The Power of Infrastructure Space. London: Verso. Fanon, Frantz. [1961] 2005. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press. Fassin, Didier. 2012. Humanitarian Reason. A Moral History of the Present. Berkeley: University of California Press. Global Networks. 2019. 19 (4): special issue on Maritime networks and transnational spaces, ed. by David Featherstone. Heller, Charles and Lorenzo Pezzani. “Liquid Traces: Investigating the Deaths of Migrants at the EU’s Maritime Frontier.” In De Genova, Nicholas ed., The Borders of “Europe.” Autonomy of Migration, Tactics of Borders, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. Heller, Charles, Lorenzo Pezzani and Maurice Stierl. 2017. “Disobedient Sensing and Border Struggles at the Martime Border of EUrope.” Spheres 4: 1–15. Hess, Sabine and Bernd Kasparek, eds. 2010. Grenzregime: Diskurse, Praktiken, Institutionen in Europa. Berlin: Assoziation A. Jones, Reece, ed. 2019. Open Borders. In Defense of Free Movement. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Lee, Suzy. 2019. “The Case for Open Borders.” Catalyst 2 (4): Winter. https://catalyst-jou rnal.com/vol2/no4/the-case-for-open-borders. Mbembe, Achille. 2003. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15 (1): 11–40. Mezzadra, Sandro. 2016. “MLC 2015 Keynote. What’s at Stake in the Mobility of Labour? Borders, Migration, Contemporary Capitalism.” Migration, Mobility & Displacement 2 (1): 31–43. Mezzadra, Sandro and Brett Neilson. 2013. Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mezzadra, Sandro and Maurice Stierl. 2019. “The Mediterranean Battlefield of Migration.” Open Democracy, April 12. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/can-europe-make-it/ mediterranean-battlefield-migration/ Rajaram, Prem Kumar. 2003. “The Pacific Solution and Australia’s Emplacement in the Pacific and on Refugee Bodies.” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 24 (3): 290–306.

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Smith, Sophie. 2017. “No More Deaths: Direct Aid in the US-Mexico Border Zone.” South Atlantic Quarterly 116 (4): 851–892. Tazzioli, Martina. 2018. “Crimes of Solidarity.” Radical Philosophy 2 (1): 4–10. Tazzioli, Martina and William Walters. 2019. “Migration, Solidarity and the Limits of Europe.” Global Discourse 9 (1): 175–190. Xiang, Biao. 2012. “Labor Transplant: ‘Point-to-Point’ Transnational Labor Migration in East Asia.” South Atlantic Quarterly 111 (4): 721–727.

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Fugitivos de la Vida imposible Transborders, migrations, and displacements José Manuel Valenzuela Arce

Introduction Migrations, displacements, and migratory caravans express extreme conditions where intense processes of social precariousness articulate with extreme conditions of violence, thus accentuating the vulnerability of migrant populations. Such defenselessness results from the implementation of the devastating strategies of neoliberal necropolitics in times of late capitalism, which turn the migratory journey into one of its most painful expressions, while strengthening the centrality of borders as a political and administrative dispositive of power and social classification. Contemporary capitalism expands social inequalities, deepens social precarization in the majority of the population, strips away resources from poor countries, compulsively generates wars and expulsion of millions of people from their lands, creating conditions of displacement in which individuals are confronted with the effects of biopolitics and necropolitics, particularly in border zones. The debate on transnational, translocal, and cross-border processes must be inscribed within interpretive frameworks wider than those of displacement, in order to understand the structured and structuring spaces that produce and define them. It is necessary to place transnational, translocal, and cross-border matters within the processes of globalization of capital, and take into consideration the needs, plundering, exclusions, and exploitation in the scale imposed by the process of capitalist accumulation. It is also necessary to take into consideration the needs for labor, as well as the interests and political actors that have a role in these processes and define the dispositions that affect border worlds.

Caravans, migrations, and borders The caravans of Central American migrants are a metaphor of the global migratory journey, since they also include migrants from Africa, particularly the Congo and Senegal, from Asia, from the Middle East, South America, and the Caribbean. Migratory caravans involve those that Eduardo Galeano generate identified as “fugitives of an impossible life,” who exist trapped in deep networks of inequality, precariousness, and violence. They belong to the half of the world’s population

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who live with less than two dollars a day, and of the miserable who hardly survive with less than one dollar, who lack formal employment, or work in informal jobs with incomes that keep them tied to conditions of poverty. They are the recipients of capitalist policies that generate in a mechanical manner untenable and arbitrary inequalities where the poorest possess almost nothing, as noted by Thomas Piketty in his book Capital in the XXI Century (2014). They are part of the 244 million migrants who, as recognized by the United Nations (ONU), inhabit the most unequal region of the world and live in the poorest and most violent Latin American countries. Inequality and precariousness obliterate the conditions necessary to build viable and livable life projects. On the contrary, these conditions trigger displacement, forced migration, escapes, and forced flirtations with death, exposing people to aggression and varied forms of violence, such as racist and gender violence, supremacists, homophobic, aporophobic, institutional, or instrumental violence. Eight out of ten countries in the world with the highest indexes of income inequality are located in Latin America. The same can be said of half of the 14 most violent countries in the world: El Salvador, Honduras, Belize, Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, Jamaica, and Venezuela. In these countries, the nomadic dramas of human diaspora materialize and advance in migratory caravans, generating multitudes as human shields or bio-cuirasses that protect themselves with the crowd, creating a collective resistance, multitudes that compose a plural corporality in order to take care of each other, that multiply the strength of their voices, and the resonance of their steps. Most of the caravaneros are young persons from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, counties whose populations grew 25% in the United States between 2007 and 2015, reaching three million, half of which are irregular migrants. (Pew Center, December 7, 2017). Most of the migrants are young persons whose future – but not their hope – has been expropriated. For this reason, they escape from misery and violence, assuming great challenges and risks. The so-called North Central American Triangle includes three small countries that together hardly reach 32 million people: El Salvador (population 6,187,271), Guatemala (16,581, 273), and Honduras (9,182,766). In the latter two countries, more than 60% lives in conditions of poverty and mortal violence, which surpasses that of countries in war. In addition, El Salvador and Guatemala have the highest indexes in the world of homicide and murder of persons of less than 20 years of age (Valenzuela 2019). The drama of migrants grew with the Cero Tolerance Law (Donald Trump 2018), since undocumented immigrants are processed and separated from their families. This situation results in 2,350 children and babies separated from their parents and other family members, isolated, and disconnected. They were also drugged, placed in cages, and arraigned in an episode that reminds us of A Universal History of Infamy, by Jorge Luis Borges. About 2,300 girls and boys crossed with the caravan that left San Pedro Sula (Honduras) on October 12, 2018. They have been the most painful part of the poignant story that in some cases touched popular sensitivity, like the case of Valeria Martinez, who drowned with her father when they were attempting to cross the Rio Colorado in Ciudad Juárez, on June 24, 2019. They had almost

Fugitivos de la Vida imposible 29 managed to do it, but the father returned to get his wife, and Valeria threw herself into the water again when she saw that her father was leaving. Oscar Martinez tried to save her but both of them drowned together, since the father covered her with his shirt to keep her from getting lost in the river. Four years ago, the international community also was shocked by the case of Alan Kurdi, the Syrian boy who also drowned, and whose body lay lifeless on the Turkish beach. Central American migratory caravans express conditions of deep dispossession, which combines the devastation of natural resources, economic and social extractivism, but also the effects of violence related to armed struggles, social conflicts, repression, external interventions, violation of human rights, loss of citizenship, and civil wars that canceled the conditions necessary for social coexistence. Among them, the armed conflict in El Salvador between July 1979 and February 1990 is particularly notorious, with 750,000 deaths and an enormous number of wounded people and orphans. A similar situation is the one in Guatemala between July 1979 and February 1990 with more than 250,000 deaths, in addition to thousands of displaced persons and violated women. It is worthwhile mentioning the case of the coup d’etat in Honduras against president Jose Manuel Celaya in 2009, and the electoral fraud in 2017, both supported by the United States. The other actors of violence are the ones that belong to the networks of organized crime. They act with intense articulation with institutional actors, establishing forms of coexistence deeply associated with the traffic of marihuana and cocaine. Those actors turned the region into a strategic space for the relocation and distribution of drugs, while triggering the increase of violence. The same happened in Mexico since the rule of Felipe Calderón in December 2006, and continued during the government of Peña Nieto, with approximately 260,000 murdered persons, 40,000 disappeared people, hundreds of clandestine tombs, thousands of unidentified dead bodies, and a strengthening of the so-called organized crime, controlling a good part of the networks and routes used by migrants to reach the border with the United States. The other important actor of violence in the Central American North Triangle is formed by groups of young people organized in neighborhoods and recognized as mareros, children and youngsters who emerged from the sectors displaced by violence in their own regions and oriented toward the United States, thus arriving at Los Angeles where they were recruited by local organizations of cholos, before they created their own. After they were deported to Central America, the members of Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18 (many of whom were born in the United States and did not speak Spanish) formed gangs and became important figures responsible for social violence and public danger. They were also receivers of the policies of tolerance implemented in Honduras through the Planes Libertad Azul (2002–2003) and Mano Dura (2003–2005) and in Guatemala, with the Plan Escoba (2003–2004). Through these plans, those groups were criminalized, and also became actors of violence and death, displacing hundreds of thousands of persons and families. The human exodus articulated in migratory caravans has shown the existence of positions and strategies created from supremacist positions of hate and racism

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in important sectors of American society, inflamed by the government of the United States. Caravans emerged as shields of protection and managed to control violence, since it only incurred in a few cases of physical aggression, while earlier two thirds of Central American migrants who crossed the Mexican territory were attacked, violated, extorted, or murdered, and one third of the women were victims of rape. The collective shield minimized violence but stimulated criminalization and manipulation of migrants, who were received in the San Isidro border with tear gas, rubber bullets, and sonic weapons. Afterward, the pressures of the American government made the new Mexican presidency change its strategy and use the National Guard to control the entrance of Central American migrants oriented toward the United States. But racist violence against migrants and against latinos in general has also increased in this country where the number of supremacist organizations has augmented, reaching 527 in 2018. This is also the case with symbolic and physical attacks, some extremely cruel, like the one perpetrated by Patrick Crusius in El Paso, Texas, August 2, 2018, who killed 22 persons and wounded 24, inspired by the positions expressed by Donald Trump with the unacceptable objective of “shooting as many Mexicans as possible.” This obliges us to rethink the meaning of borders as dispositifs of power and social classification.

Borders as a dispositive of power and social classification Borders are thresholds and dispositifs of power that function as political and cultural systems of social classification. Borders are socially and historically constructed, something that allows us to recognize that there “natural” borders do not exist. All borders refer to historically, socially, and culturally constructed delimitations. Borders are also part of the systems of social and territorial classification, delimitation, and organization. National borders have a double political and socio-spatial implication: the transborder condition and the transnational condition. All transborder relations imply a transnational dimension, and all transnational dimensions imply transborder relations. Recently, the transnational condition has been widely emphasized, thus recuperating many of the elements that have defined in the last 50 years the debates about borders. The most important thing is to understand transborder, transnational, and translocal phenomena taking into consideration the presence and intensity of the processes that are being interpreted. Occasionally, the same phenomenon, such as migration, becomes very dense in the original spaces, during transits, in the border, or in the points of arrival; in other cases, just one of those spaces concentrates the positive and negative force of migratory experiences. The debate about transnational, transborder, or translocal processes must be inscribed in interpretive frameworks that are wider than the notion of displacement, in order to situate the interpretation in the structured and structuring spaces that produce and define those phenomena. It is necessary to place transborder, transnational, and translocal themes within the processes of globalization of capitalism and its needs, exclusions, and its exploitation in the scale imposed by the

Fugitivos de la Vida imposible 31 process of capitalist accumulation. It is necessary also to consider the needs of labor, as well as the interests and political actors that participate and define the dispositions that affect bordering worlds. Capitalism generates multiple spaces of precarization that influence the decision to emigrate seeking better living conditions. The interpretive conditions that help us to explore and interpret borders according to what I have been proposing in previous publications (Valenzuela, Intromisiones compartidas, Por las fronteras del norte y Transfronteras) are the following: contact zones, conjunctive conditions, disjunctive conditions, connective, interstitial conditions, injunctive conditions, generative conditions, performative-prefigurative conditions, and bio- and necropolitical conditions. Contact zones. Recreating the concept developed by Mary Louise Pratt (1997), zones of cultural contact refer to spaces where different sociocultural expressions converge, often structured on the basis of asymmetric power relations where daily forms of social and cultural interaction are established. In the borders, contact zones refer to realities that imply and overcome the implications of some concepts such as vicinity, adjacency, or proximity. Contact zones imply daily transborder relations that define the spaces conceived, lived, and represented by Lefebvre (1991). Conjunctive conditions. We can think about borders based on a series of analytical axes where borders unite and generate relations between social groups that were separated. The conjunctive dimension refers to the dimension of correlation, incorporation, and integration of processes that were originally separated. This is, then, one of the characteristic qualities of borders. Conjunction implies processes of proximity, vicinity, intense and daily interaction, and livability. In the Mexico-US border, in addition to family relations and friendships, intense economic, commercial, and recreational relations take place, with an occurrence of 182, 871, and 636 annual border crossings (Bureau of Transportation Statistics, 2017).1 Disjunctive condition. At the same time, borders have a disjunctive condition. Border demarcations divide villages or cities, ethnic groups, communities, families, and persons. For this reason, borders also separate, disunite, and move away. Although very often the disjunctive condition is presented as the unique and totalizing element in the definition of borders, it should be emphasized that borders are much more than the mere separation or division between countries or social groups. It is important to consider both dimensions, the conjunctive and the disjunctive dimension, in order to construct a clear and more complex perspective of border worlds. Connective condition. Borders have connective mediations that produce forms of coexistence that go beyond zones of contact or proximity. This condition has strengthened in an unimaginable manner in the last few years through the mass media and the new electronic dispositifs such as telephone, Internet, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, elements that have created new forms of living together, new connective strategies that overcome displacements, since mass media allow for conditions that are much more agile and accessible of displacement. The

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connective dimension, as it establishes new forms of coexistence, also generates strategies and processes of simultaneity through which persons can interact independently on each side of the border. These situations are very attractive if we think, for instance, in Mexican agricultural workers who work exhausting working days in the American fields without any contact with their families and communities in Mexico, except for the letters that arrived after several months or the occasional news brought by relatives or countrymen that came from the homeland. We can recognize that the scenery changed when these workers could listen for the first time to the songs and voices in their own language on the radio, or when many years later they could see programs on TV in their own language. Nowadays, connective co-presence is direct, immediate, through the Internet, Skype, Facetime, and many other forms of production of instant relations that make it possible a daily connection through forms that allow for conditions of simultaneity. Interstitial condition. Borders also have an interstitial condition, which alludes to the liminal dimension, nepantla or in-between. This is a very important matter, because in addition to the separation and conjunction, there are border spaces that are different from non-border zones. This interstitial, numinous, or liminal condition implies characteristics that are important to consider because they allow us to understand the features of the border that emerged from the experiences of coexistence and interaction, and that possess a dimension that is different in non-border areas. We can emphasize the existence of certain cultural aspects in border life, such as the use of some colloquial idioms or some behavioral patterns that have a transborder condition, but that do not present themselves in the same manner in non-border spaces. We are talking about a kind of transborder habitus. We use here Bourdieu’s concept in order to define the interiorization and subjectification of sociocultural relations and processes that emerge from the objectified and intersubjective social reality of the borders. Injunctive condition. Borders are defined not only by horizontal social processes, and do not refer exclusively to forms of coexistence, since, as previously indicated, they are defined by social and political relations and by power relations that function as dispositifs of social classification. The injunctive condition refers to State policies and public policies that are neither horizontal nor democratic. We speak of policies that result in the creation of laws, regulations, but also punitive strategies, strategies of control, strategies of vigilance, and political strategies that imply, in turn, biopolitics and necropolitics that are supported by a broken and questionable concept of sovereignty that defers from the meaning this notion had in the nineteenth century. The disjunctive condition refers to the political dimension of the State, where the nation-State and nationalism have different expressive forms in which we can distinguish self-determinist, legitimating, popular, imperial, and expansive nationalism (Valenzuela, El color de las sombras, y Impecable y diamantina). On the basis of these conditions, we can recognize elements that define border politics, the same that are inscribed in the characteristics of State politics and the priorities and strategies of the nation-State in relation to the notion of not only

Fugitivos de la Vida imposible 33 sovereignty, commercial relations, or friendly and familiar relations, but also new elements related to national security, which have acquired recently spectacular relevance, until they presented coarse, racist, supremacist, xenophobic, and delirious connotations since the inception of Donald Trump presidency. We can observe the increase of punitive strategies against migrants; however, it is important to emphasize that during the government of Barak Obama, 2,800 deportations took place, although in only 100 days of government, Donald Trump generated extremely disturbing situation in connection to the strategies of repression, detention, and deportation of migrants, and frontal attacks to sanctuary cities and dreamers, as demonstrated by his decision of September 2017 to eliminate DACA, and his delirious project to construct another wall in the border with Mexico. Another fundamental matter related to the injunctive condition and power of the State in the definition of the criteria and strategies of social classification is the migratory policy that has recently acquired huge relevance due to a series of elements that are associated strategically with these policies, such as the role of narcotrafficking and organized crime, whose members have been implied in the migratory networks, thus increasing the occurrence of deaths and violence against migrants. The injunctive condition implies processes of entrenchment of old and new borders where walls acquire important centrality. We do not only have walls made out of concrete that we can identify clearly in the history of the Chinese Wall, the sad wall of Berlin, or the ignominious wall built by Israel in Palestine land, as well as other walls that continue to indicate important disagreements in the contemporary world. There are also metallic walls, such as those that were established in approximately one third of the 3,164 kilometers of the Mexico-US border. Borders engulfed by metallic panels brought from the Persian Gulf as war emblems were installed in order to demarcate the new codifications that define the relation between both countries or, to put it more widely, the relations between the United States and Latin America. We also have water walls that have turned the Mediterranean Sea into a huge grave of migrants similar to what happened to Central American migration and Cuban migration toward the United States. I recuperate here the image of water walls from the work of José Revueltas in order to emphasize the condition of separation, the absence and liquid death that has flowed with neither control nor compassion in the last decades, killing thousands of African migrants. Finally, there are symbolic walls, invisible walls, and naturalized walls that we do not see but that are constructed in different spaces of intolerance, racism, sexism, and homophobia. These are walls nurtured by the construction of a threatening Other. Generative condition. Borders have a generative condition. Contrary to the widely disseminated images of the border as a cultural desert (Vasconcelos), borders are fertile spaces for the emergence, generation, or appearance of new phenomena and sociocultural processes. These cultural processes rooted in the condition of the border define the creative force of border worlds. The generative

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condition, or the condition that generates the border, is constructed through processes of cultural appropriation, which means, through the incorporation of cultural elements that originate in the other side of the border, processes of cultural recreation, redefined and resignified, that acquire new sense when incorporated within the frameworks of meaning and significance of border culture, with its processes of hybridization, where sociocultural innovation results from the intense relationship between different cultures, with its processes of appropriation, recreation, resistance, and conflict. The generative condition implies innovation, and this innovation refers to the processes of construction of new meanings and significance of social and cultural border processes. This refers not only to the emergence of new things and processes. These are emergent and appropriate cultural elements, significance, and meanings that are incorporated into the definition of social and cultural border relations. Performative and prefigurative condition. Borders have a performative or prefigurative condition, since sociocultural phenomena emerge as part of border worlds and networks. Many social processes and border phenomena are reproduced and recreated in non-border contexts. We can allude to diverse experiences that help us understand this concept, but I believe that for our purposes, today the following examples may be enough: 1) The maquila. Since its emergence with the program of border industrialization in 1965, the maquila industry, considered an exclusively border matter, implied feminization of labor, precarization, lack of protection for workers, denial and obliteration of collective contracts, sexual harassment, increment of labor-related illnesses, reduction of social benefits, etc. But the maquila was not only an exclusive problem of border zones, as we have seen with its expansion across the country in all directions, in border zones, in Central America, in Colombia, Chile but also in Asia, and many other places. The maquila prefigured flexible scenarios of internationalization of capitals and labor, devaluation of salaries, and intensive use of labor, as part of the neoliberal capitalism that represents the historical defeat of workers. 2) Consumerism. The topic of consumerism in border areas has been identified as a central element of border culture. However, globalization of consumerism through Walmart, Costco, and many other transnational chains standardize forms of consumption in middle and high classes. In many ways, certain practices of border consumption expanded through middle and high classes and in not bordering areas and countries. 3) Language. Another topic related to the performative and prefigurative condition of border worlds is border language, a clearly located and identifiable language that progressively lost its original rooting and has been recuperated and recreated in non-border contexts. This process refers to the rich expansion of border language, which has been appropriated in other contexts, not only at a national but also at international levels, particularly among young populations.

Fugitivos de la Vida imposible 35 4) Pachomas. Something similar happens with youth cultures. We have seen and recognized the emergence of cultural forms related to the identities of border youth, particularly since the end of the 1930s with the appearance of pachucos, the cholos in the 1960s, and Mara Salvatrucha in the 1980s. I have defined these identities with the name of pachomas, a world created from the first letters of the triad pachucos, cholos, and maras, as cultural expressions and identities rooted in Mexican and Chicano neighborhoods on both sides of the Mexico-US border. These new identities not only generated different aspects of survival and ethical and aesthetic elements defined by these neighborhood figures. They also incorporated codes of initiation into those areas and other aspects related to that daily environment as part of behaviors emerged from an enclosed identity that integrates codes of survival (if you betray me, I will kill you) and trenches where to leave the neighborhood may imply death (Valenzuela, ¡A la brava, ése!, El color de las sombras, Las maras y Transfronteras). This enclosed identity is constantly tested through conflict and confrontation with other neighborhoods and other gangs. This neighborhood condition also constructs clicas, stronger forms enclosed in their own neighborhoods, that confer significance to space through placazos and murals, elements that define and identify the members of the clica, the neighborhood, or the gang. Language is also a referent for identification through the use of a slang influenced by border language (Valenzuela, ¡A la brava, ése! y Las maras). But they also produce a language of gestures and a strong incorporation of the body, signified through tattoos and outfits that also constitute an aesthetics that emerge from neighborhoods and challenges fashions and aesthetic-dominant criteria. This situation illustrates the performative or prefigurative condition of border cultures, which has extended to non-border spacers in Mexico, the United States, Central America (e.g., maras), and other countries, but also to Europe (Latino and Latina Queens, and the Ñetas in Spain). More recently, these organizations have also been recreated in Italy. 5) In the same manner, we can also identify different artistic processes utilized for the recreation of border worlds that have become very relevant in literature but also in the visual arts and in the urban public spaces through the construction of murals. All of this demonstrates the existence of a rich and robust border culture, and its central importance in contemporary cultures (Valenzuela, Nosotros. Arte, cultura).

Biopolitical conditions at the border Borders are characterized by a biopolitical condition that manifests itself through a variety of dispositifs aimed at migrant control, which allow for the implementation of a series of strategies that utilize power, submission, violence, humiliation,

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and degradation. Some examples that illustrate this biopolitical condition are the doping and imprisonment of migrant children during Donald Trump’s government, and the fumigation of the bodies and clothing of hired workers during the Bracero Program (1942–1964), as well as the exhaustive revisions of their naked bodies and their belongings, including chemical scanning and X-rays, use of tear gas and sonic weapons, beatings, humiliations, and imprisonment, in addition to sexual aggressions and rapes suffered by many women during their border crossing.

Necropolitical conditions at the border Very often, borders become necrozones or zones of death, where people lose their lives due to dehydration, hypothermia, attacks by polleros, narcotraffickers, or police agents or border guards who are responsible for multiple cases of murder of migrants due to excessive use of force, torture, or shootings. Necropolitical dispositifs include calculated risks. For example, through migratory strategies, migrants are redirected toward increasingly dangerous routes. Also, the conditions of vulnerability and death that occur in the walls of water, where the hopes of migrants succumb, as it happens in the Mediterranean zone, in the Caribbean, in the Suchiate river, or in the Río Bravo, where so many lives placed at the limit of their possibilities are wrecked while aiming for a better life, and escaping from violence and a probable death. In addition, militarized border controls, as well as wars and conflicts between neighboring countries, intensify border necropolitics.

Referents and significance of border classification As we have indicated, borders work as dispositifs for social classification and have a strategic function in the contention or fluidity of the border crossing, in the conditions of transit, and in the possibilities to succeed or to fail in the attempts to trespass border thresholds. National and social inequalities have an impact on the possibility of succeeding in the crossing of the border. If we think of borders as dispositifs of social classification, it is important to incorporate elements that have an impact on the increment or diminishing of the possibilities to succeed. This has become evident in the studies that show that in cities such as Tijuana, half of the population does not have a passport and cannot cross to the other side. Social class continues to be a factor that allows obtaining a passport as well as other forms of border crossing, and functions very well as a vehicle for crossing or contention. Proscribed national identities. We can observe the proscription of some countries whose social, cultural, and political characteristics are considered undesirable from supremacist perspectives that have gained a presence in the United States, where they allow identifying countries whose peoples or residents are considered undesirable and, as a consequence, are denied entry in the United States. This criterion is also prominent in border zones, particularly when there are

Fugitivos de la Vida imposible 37 national inequalities based on a stigmatizing system used for the construction of cultural differences. But we are also speaking of ethnic differences. Ethnicity is a key matter in the constitution of border networks of social classification, because stigmatization and proscription limit the possibilities of border crossing. Religious aspects are also very important, particularly when they are associated with certain political positions, as in the case of Muslims, who are considered to have homogeneous political and religious beliefs and are identified as terrorists, without any additional considerations. We can make reference to academic and conservative studies that have supremacist perspectives, such as Choque de civilizaciones (1997) by Samuel Huntington, where this author emphasized that Muslim culture was a threat to the West. Afterward, in Who Are We? (2004), he indicated that due to its cultural, linguistic, and identitarian persistence, Mexican and latino culture constitute the main threat for US security. Another condition that shapes networks and dispositifs of social classification in border zones has to do with gender. Differential conditions apply for border crossing depending on gender, a key aspect in the formation of border spaces and border worlds.

Cultural dispositifs of classification Borders function as racialized systems and as systems of racialization, and operate through frameworks organized from fundamentalist perspectives, supremacist orders, and structured positions that block the crossing of certain groups, previously identified or proscribed. Sociocultural dispositifs that have the power to organize these differences are as follows: a) Prejudices. Within the systems of classification, we should emphasize the importance of prejudice, a condition based on ignorance and lack of firsthand knowledge that constructs an Other as a homogeneous and monolithic entity, and from that construction, they establish criteria and dispositions that are detrimental for those groups affected by prejudice. b) Stereotypes. These are solidified positions that go beyond ignorance about who are the others that are being deprecated. Prejudices emerge when, in spite of the evidence that demonstrates the error of assumed positions, the hardened position against the other is maintained in order to keep him/her at a distance and in a subordinate position. c) Stigma. Stigmas continue to operate. This concept used by Erving Goffman (2006) continues to be useful to think about sociocultural relations in border worlds. Border functions on the basis of marks that define cultural features used to construct discredited and discreditable identities, and this condition of discredited or precarious identity formed on the basis of stigmas makes it possible to exclude and proscribe those who have been stigmatized. d) Racism. As systems and dispositifs of social classification, borders operate through systems of racialization that construct superior and inferior races and

38

José Manuel Valenzuela Arce

(re)produce racist relations. The systems of racialization attribute crystallized or essentialized features to phenotypical or cultural characteristics of human beings in order to generate supremacist strategies of discrimination, but they also function as social, political, and cultural dispositifs that make it possible to produce and reproduce the conditions of proscription of the individuals diminished and subalternized by the systems of racialization. e) Sexism. This is also one of the key elements that partake in the construction of processes of discrimination and exclusion, as a central part of the network that configures intercultural relations and defines the features of border and transborder worlds.

Conclusion As we have indicated before, in border studies, metaphors have replaced research as well as the knowledge of the processes that define life in the border. I am not trying to disqualify or deny recognition of the important role of metaphors as constructions that allow us to think about some aspects of reality. However, the strategic condition of the Mexico-US border, as that of many other borders in the world, requires approaches that facilitate the precise understanding of its intelligibility, its problems and challenges, and its economic, social, and cultural expressions. At the same time, we need to advance beyond limited perspectives that overemphasize some of the features of the border using concepts such as porosity, contingence, and limits. I have presented here a series of conceptual axes that constitute a theoretical proposal for the interpretation of borders and border worlds. At the same time, these conceptual axes help us construct methodological approaches that mediate between our heuristic platforms and the economic, political, social, and cultural processes that give meaning to our daily reality and border imaginaries, recognizing the complexity of borders and their constitution as political and power constructions that function as dispositifs of social classification, thus increasing the vulnerability and defenseless position of individuals that take recourse to displacements, migration, and migratory caravans as a strategy oriented to the conquest of better living conditions, confronting great risks, aggressions, and, very often, death. Nobody should die for exercising his/ her human right to emigrate. Translated by Mabel Moraña

Note 1 These numbers correspond to crossings by foot and crossings in private vehicles in all the ports of entry located in the Mexico-US border during 2016: Tijuana/San Diego, Ciudad Juarez/El Paso, Nogales/ Tucson, Nuevo Laredo/Laredo and Matamoros/Brownsville.

Bibliography Bourdieu, Pierre. Razones prácticas: sobre la teoría de la acción. Barcelona: Anagrama, 1997.

Fugitivos de la Vida imposible 39 Bureau of Transportation Statistics. “Border Crossing/Entry Data: Query Detailed Statistics.” [Consulta: 12 de septiembre de 2017]. Giménez Montiel, Gilberto. Estudios sobre la cultura y las identidades sociales. México: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes/Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Occidente, 2007. Giménez Montiel, Gilberto. “La frontera norte como representación y referente cultural en México.” Revista Territorio y frontera, II, 3 (2007): 17–34. Goffman, Erving. Estigma. La identidad deteriorada. Buenos Aires: Amorrortu Editores, 2006. Huntington, Samuel. Choque de civilizaciones y la reconfiguración del orden mundial. Buenos Aires: Paidós, 1997. Huntington, Samuel. ¿Quiénes somos? Desafíos de la identidad nacional estadounidense. Barcelona: Paidós, 2004. Lavandera, Ed y Jason Hanna (August 9, 2019). El Paso Suspect Told Police He Was Targeting Mexicans, Affidavit Says. CNN. https://edition.cnn.com/2019/08/09/us/el -paso-shooting-friday/index.html Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1991. Pratt, Mary Louise. Ojos imperiales: literatura de viajes y transculturación. Buenos Aires: Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, 1997. Southern Poverty Law Center. Hate Map. Montgomery, AL. SPL Center. 2018. https:// www.splcenter.org/hate-map. Valenzuela, José Manuel. El color de las sombras. Chicanos, identidad y racismo. México: El Colegio de la Frontera Norte/Plaza y Valdés, 1997. Valenzuela, José Manuel. ¡A la brava, ése! Identidades juveniles en México: cholos, punks y chavos banda. Segunda edición. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1998. Valenzuela, José Manuel (coord.). Por las fronteras del norte. Una aproximación cultural a la frontera México-Estados Unidos. México: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes/Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2003. Valenzuela, José Manuel. Impecable y diamantina. La deconstrucción del discurso nacional. México: El Colegio de la Frontera Norte/Pablos Editor, 2009. Valenzuela, José Manuel. Nosotros. Arte, cultura e identidad en la frontera MéxicoEstados Unidos, México: CONACULTA, 2012. Valenzuela, José Manuel (Coord.) Transfronteras. Fronteras del mundo y procesos culturales. Tijuana: El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, 2014. Valenzuela, José Manuel (Coord.). Tropeles juveniles. Culturas e identidades (trans) fronterizas. Monterrey, Nuevo León: El Colegio de la Frontera Norte/Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, 2014. Valenzuela, José Manuel and Nestor García Canclini (Coords.). Intromisiones compartidas. Arte y sociedad en la frontera México-Estados Unidos. México: Programa de Fomento a Proyectos y Coinversiones Culturales del Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes/ INSITE97, 2000. Valenzuela, José Manuel, Alfredo Nateras Domínguez, Rossana Reguillo (Coords.). Las maras: identidades juveniles al límite. México: El Colegio de la Frontera Norte/Juan Pablo Editores, 2013. Vasconcelos, José. La Tormenta. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1982. Vasconcelos, José. Ulises Criollo. México: Fondo Cultura Económica, 1982.

Part II

Labor, politics, and the question of limits

3

Transmigrants as embodiment of biocapitalism Abril Trigo

Contemporary migratory movements are – directly and indirectly – not just an effect of neoliberal policies in the peripheries of global capitalism, but a crucial component of the international and transnational division of labor implemented by the flexible and combined biocapitalist regime of accumulation. Over the last four decades, a network of transnational, regional, and internal migratory movements has provided capital with an abundant, mobile, and cheap labor force not just required in the economic centers, but in the semi-peripheries as well. Due to their massive numbers and extreme vulnerability, transnational migrants in particular occupy the most precarious position in the global division of labor: the weakest link – though a fundamental one – in the chain of valorization and capital accumulation. The current xenophobic backlash against migrants worldwide is a predictable corollary to the effects of the second “great transformation” (Polanyi The Great Transformation) effected upon the entire capitalist mode of production, circulation, and consumption at a global scale: the second “great transformation” that generated the fastest and largest accumulation and concentration of capital in history annals, while throwing millions of people into a precarious life and an uncertain future. Social feelings of anxiety, fear, and helplessness are easily metamorphosed in xenophobia and racism by right-wing political agents, feeding neonationalist and neofascist movements, always capital’s political tool of last resort. In a dreadful twist, the demonization and dehumanization of migrants ends up providing capital with an even more vulnerable labor force and cheaper provision of labor power, while making migrants scapegoats of the brutal effects of biocapitalism. This involves a vast and devastating humanitarian crisis that has mobilized international organizations, NGOs, and human rights activists across the world, and has created a political crisis that has cornered national governments and international organizations between the Scylla and Charybdis of capital’s requirements and nationalist demands. While human rights organizations have rescued people from drowning in the seas, denounced the insidious business of human trafficking, and demanded the recognition of the freedom to migrate as a universal human right, governments have closed borders, reinstated legal barriers, and made life unbearable to all those without legalized migratory documentation. Undoubtedly,

44 Abril Trigo the crisis is both political and humanitarian, but against the backdrop of this larger scenario, I propose to read the widespread backlash against transnational migrants as part and parcel of a deeper crisis that points to the limits of capital, meaning as a symptom of the inherent contradictions of biocapitalism, which throws millions of people into an increasingly overexploited and precarious life while keeping astronomical levels of capital concentration and accumulation. Biocapitalism – according to the Italian autonomista movement – can be defined as a new capitalist sociocultural formation that evolves from the crisis of the Fordist-Keynesian regime of accumulation in the 1970s. This implies a flexible and combined regime of accumulation – partially following here the French regulation school (Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation) – based upon the real, formal, and/or virtual subsumption of life, in its multiple forms, to the commodity form, so that both the objective and subjective spheres of social human life become sources for the extraction of surplus value. Said differently, life becomes not just a source of value, but value itself, though not necessarily valuable, in what amounts to a new “great transformation” of the capitalist system, a pivotal revolution from within that signals the coming of a new epoch. According to Vanni Codeluppi: Biocapitalism is the most advanced form of the capitalist economic model. A form that is characterized by its growing intertwining with the lives of human beings. (It) produces value by extracting it not only from the body operating as a material tool of work, but also from the body understood in its totality. Therefore, it acts on all the biological components as well as on the mental, relational and emotional dimensions of individuals. … Biocapitalism, however, is not satisfied with working time, but also tries to exploit free time, which serves individuals above all to define their own social identity, and which is therefore inevitably intertwined with the most intimate components of human personality. Free time is largely occupied by consumer activities, through which individuals can build and maintain their identity over time. And it is precisely by operating in the sphere of consumption that they are able to intervene more massively on emotions and affects. (Codeluppi Il biocapitalismo, 7–8) Codeluppi’s definition indicates how both space and time, body and mind, the individual and society, directly or indirectly subsumed to the commodity form, become sources of surplus value. It describes the shift from the typical FordistTaylorist organization of labor focused on production to the flexible and reticulated managing of labor and consumption at all moments of the economic cycle, with particular emphasis on the omnivorous subsumption of labor time and leisure time, production and consumption. In this manner, biocapitalism is not just focused any longer on the objective sphere of social labor, but on the subjective sphere of social life as well – emotions, affects, experiences, desires: culture, sociality, and subjectivity – which become entangled in the production of value. This provides a sound point of departure for a definition of the bios in the particular

Transmigrants as embodiment of biocapitalism 45 framework of the biocapitalist regime of accumulation. The notion is obviously inspired in Foucault’s biopolitics (The Birth of Biopolitics) – and to a certain degree in Agamben’s distinction between bios, the qualified life of citizens, and zoê, the bare life of those deprived of rights and thus reduced to the mere survival of their bodies (Homo Sacer).

The embodied abstraction of the bios Contemporary transnational migrations are – directly and indirectly – not just an effect of neoliberal policies in the peripheries of global capitalism, but a crucial component of the international and transnational division of labor implemented by biocapitalism. Over the last four decades, transnational migratory movements have provided capital with an abundant, mobile, and cheap labor force not just in the economic centers, but in the semi-peripheries as well. In consequence, transnational migrancy is a human phenomenon – as much as an economic and social one – structurally articulated to the current regime of accumulation. According to Fumagalli, “The multiple forms of bio-labor are in fact nomadic labor, where mobility is a primary requisite” (“Twenty Theses,” 12). He is explicitly referring to the conditions of mobility and precariousness that characterize contractual labor, which aggravated on informal labor, end up in the ordeal of migration and some forms of semi-slave labor experienced by migrants. Due to their massive numbers and extreme vulnerability, transmigrants occupy the most precarious position in the global division of labor and constitute, as said before, the weakest – but crucial – link in the current dynamics of biocapitalist exploitation. These millions of people scattered around the world, working and dreaming with their hands, their bodies, their flesh, their hunger, their anguish, embody the bios subsumed and exploited to the last drop of blood by biocapitalism. Transmigrants – particularly racialized, undocumented migrants – epitomize the bios in biocapitalism. In this section, I will follow the study on transnational migration by Sandro Mezzadra, a prominent member of the biocapitalist school, particularly on his book, Border as Method, or the Multiplication of Labor, written with Brett Neilson (2013). In this book, Mezzadra and Neilson offer a comprehensive, structural analysis of what they call a global migratory regime that works closely articulated to a global regime of labor. The conceptualization of both spheres as articulated regimes, partially autonomous but interdependent, sheds light on the systemic nature of the entire biocapitalist regime of accumulation and the international and transnational division of labor. The adoption of the notion of a migratory regime is pertinent and significant. The concept of “regime” makes possible to study contemporary migratory flows – in particular transnational migrations – as complex and overdetermined processes subjected to economic pressures, the pervasive instability and precariousness of labor, the amorphous nature of the global regime of accumulation, the heterogeneity of political actors, and the contradictory policies regarding governmentality and the control of borders. As Mezzadra and Neilson rightly state, the objective of this migratory regime is not to stop migration, but administer it selectively

46 Abril Trigo in order to appropriate the human, financial, and technical capital of potential migrants, to regulate internal labor markets, and to control working populations. In other words, its main though undeclared goal is to regulate the production, circulation, and reproduction of local, national, and global labor force according to the interests of global capital. More concretely, it aims to manage the flows of migrants and the adequate provision of the cheapest and more vulnerable labor force according to the needs of corporations, countries, cities, localities, etc., as well as to maintain large reserve armies of unused labor force, particularly by implementing the virtual subsumption of the unemployed waiting at the doors of actual employment (the manipulation of labor markets and the creation of artificial, virtual shortages of labor to keep salaries low and populations under control). What for many countries is an unfair brain drain (fuga de cerebros), the seizure of social capital, for others it represents the free importation of human capital, or in fact its embodied commodity, labor power. As a matter of fact, the main purpose of border and migratory regimes is simply to manage the production and distribution of labor power. In a sense, the flows of labor cannot be valued without paying attention to the flows of capital, because labor in capitalism is always abstract, as much as social, and its realization as such is only possible in the world market and as a global labor force (Mezzadra and Neilson Border as Method, 88). In fact, the concept of abstract labor, which implies capital’s indifference to the concrete social circumstances under which labor is performed, allowed Marx to hazard the political figure of an international working class. Although the abstraction of labor remains an important part of the workings of global capitalism, what we have been calling the multiplication of labor shows how complicated the process of translating the abstract into the concrete has become. The switch between the abstract and the concrete does not necessarily produce the homogenizing effects that give rise to what Marx saw as a revolutionary working-class subject. This is the origin of the problem of heterogeneity. (Mezzadra and Neilson Border as Method, 97) For Mezzadra and Neilson, the global regime of labor is actually an ensemble of the most diverse regimes of labor and modes of production. They actually criticize the concept of an international division of labor, and propose instead the notion of “global multiplication of labor,” based upon the actual heterogeneity of the global space of capital and labor, and with the purpose of understanding how the new modes of production work by exploiting the continuities, deviations, and discontinuities – the borders – between different labor regimes (Mezzadra and Neilson Border as Method, 97–98). This multiplication of labor has occurred in at least three different ways. First, it has intensified, in the sense that its tendency to colonize the totality of the workers’ life has become more pronounced than ever; second, it has diversified, according to a process already identified by Marx in his analysis in the Grundrisse about the creation of relative surplus value, which continuously pushes capital toward the development of a broader system with

Transmigrants as embodiment of biocapitalism 47 constantly expanding forms of labor, different modes of production, and endless needs; and third, it has become more heterogeneous in regard to its legal and social regimes of organization (Mezzadra and Neilson Border as Method, 88). But, as Aníbal Quijano has argued, racialized labor regimes are also constitutive of the capitalist world system and its historically combined and uneven regimes of accumulation: During European colonial world domination, the distribution of work of the entire world capitalist system, between salaried, independent peasants, independent merchants, and slaves and serfs, was organized basically following the same “racial” lines of global social classification. … So, coloniality of power is based upon “racial” social classification of the world population under Eurocentered world power. (“Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” 171) Inés Valdez, through a different route, demonstrates that migratory regimes can be traceable to the origins of world capitalism. According to Valdez, the history of modern empires is one of mobility. As she argues, Africans forced into slavery, and massive migrations from Europe and later from China and India, under convict or indentured labor systems, of people ejected by land enclosures, starvation, or depopulation, provided the necessary labor force that contributed from the colonies to the development of industrial capitalism in England. Labor flows may fulfill capital’s needs for labor, but their movement and permanence is subordinated to racialized regimes of movement that made labor “unfree” and more manageable to employers. This imperial manageability, importantly, became institutionalized through sovereign states. (Valdez “Socialism and Empire,” 16) The racialization of labor, she contends, had – and still has – a dual purpose: to better exploit a movable, dependent, and racialized non-Western labor force, while policing the Western labor force by instigating fear, racism, and xenophobia against the racialized (br)other. In consequence, contemporary hostility toward immigration appears not as an exception to the prevalence of liberal principles within Western democracies but instead as continuous with the imperial management of labor that co-existed with formative democratic moments in liberal polities. (Valdez “Socialism and Empire,” 17) Clearly, current political outbursts of nationalism, xenophobic populism, and neofascism are evidence of a deeper crisis that points to the limits of capital, predictable corollaries to the devastating effects of the biocapitalist regime of accumulation, but they also indicate the darkest underside of the liberal state, its liberal policies, and the liberal mind.

48 Abril Trigo Border regimes are regulated by different, and many times conflicting international norms and national policies that fluctuate according to multiple local, national, and regional factors, including, of course, national politics, ethnic conflicts, and institutional divergences. However, the global migratory regime, articulated, as it is, to the global biocapitalist regime of labor, is ruled according to the needs of capital accumulation and the equilibrium between supply and demand in local labor markets, and this is the reason why contemporary border regimes of migration blur the boundaries between norm and exception, governance and sovereignty. No matter the forms of governmentality (or governance, depending on its degree of political and ideological privatization) applied to the control and circulation of populations, the opening and closure of state borders is ruled by the production and reproduction of the labor force. The vociferously political persecution of undocumented migrants, their imprisonment in detention centers, family separation, deportation, and vilification even before they start their exodus, as well as more symbolic measures such as the building of walls, are ultimately ruled by the legal production of illegality. Because her illegal status is what makes the migrant vulnerable, deportable, disposable, a docile source of labor power, she becomes a crucial commodity for the valorization of capital. In the world factory of global biocapitalism, the borders become an engine for the legal production of illegal aliens (Mezzadra and Neilson Border as Method, 149-150). In this regard, the figure of the illegal migrant is a political construction that supports the entire global labor chain. This is why transnational migrancy is much more than a human rights issue, or a moral issue, because it reproduces the historically systemic exploitation of racialized and colonized labor implemented by the indissoluble partnership of capitalism and coloniality.

Human trafficking, the clue of the puzzle1 Transnational migration, which will continue to grow regardless of how much it is repressed or regulated, provides the cheap and skilled labor required by capital in relatively more developed economies, where a confluence of economic, demographic, and social factors generates a demand that domestic markets are unable to fill. It is a fallacy that migrants take the jobs of nationals, as a fatal combination of impoverishment, hopelessness, and anxiety makes people believe, but it is undeniable too that constant migratory flows contribute to the fall of wages. It is also a fallacy that transnational migration configures a privileged space where deterritorialized migrants become global citizens in a world without borders. Ultimately, migrants journey is seduced by a global imaginary that promises the absolute freedom of the homo economicus, a utopia with no topos, in Bauman’s words, that precludes the possibility of any utopia (Society under Siege, 238; Liquid Modernity, 22). This global imaginary (Coronil “Del eurocentrismo al globocentrismo”), which allows the cosmopolitan elites to contemplate the world as aloof tourists while feeling entitled as global citizens, has come to replace the Eurocentric imaginary at the core of Western modernity. This global-centric

Transmigrants as embodiment of biocapitalism 49 imaginary captures the experience of the global elites, not the experience of migrants. Many experts on transnational studies share the view that the revolution in communications and transport gave migrants the possibility to opt for the continuance of active transnational connections between homeland and the host country instead of assimilation – in other words, they’ve gained in mobility and independence (Kennedy and Roudometoff Communities across Borders, 13). The truth is that all the conveniences in terms of mobility and connectivity provided by the new means of communication and transportation, in addition to the rampant inequality brought by the global biocapitalist regime of labor, and the extreme vulnerability of (prospective) migrants (particularly, of course, those in irregular situations), make them an inexhaustible source of cheap, abundant, submissive, and virtually invisible labor (Bustamante, “Extreme vulnerability of migrants”). Transnational migration supplements, in a perverse way, the maquila regime and the informal economy, central parts of the complex international and transnational division of labor. David Bacon convincingly demonstrates the correlation between the effects of the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) in Mexico and the subsequent increase in illegal migration to the United States: how the liberalization of imports of subsidized corn from the United States ruined small Mexican farmers, displacing thousands of families who went on to swell the ranks of undocumented labor in the northern country. This is a labor force indispensable for the operation of the US entire economy at globally competitive prices, and on which entire sectors of the agricultural and food industries rest. This includes a variety of activities, from picking fruits and vegetables to the dairy and meat-packing plants, not to mention construction, gardening, and the vast and amorphous field of hospitality services. In other words, transnational migration – documented or undocumented, legal or illegal – is triggered by the biocapitalist organization of labor and production that facilitates the free mobility of capital, in order to regulate the availability of abundant cheap labor on a global scale. The transnationalization of the workforce is equivalent to a global administration of bodies, a new biopolitical device. The same system that generates migration takes advantage of it; the same capitals that displace peasants from one country will grab them as cheap labor in the other, and although not all of them will necessarily become transmigrants, many of them will end up working at the maquilas, free zones, and other forms of enclave economies (Bacon, Illegal People). Against the US stereotype that all Latin American migrants are unskilled and uneducated indigenous peasants coming from Mexico, Solimano points out that Latin American migration is mainly composed of women and young people, mostly with a medium-high education degree (Solimano, International Migration, 131). This points to what Latin Americans characterize as fuga de cerebros, or “brain drain,” the net transfer of human capital and socially accumulated knowledge from peripheral countries to the central economies. According to the neoliberal version, superbly represented in Latin America by Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, the informal economy – unreported and unrecorded economy on the sides of the state-regulated formal economy, which

50 Abril Trigo should not be confused with “black market” or illegal/criminal economy – arises as a reaction to the state’s incapacity to satisfy the basic needs of impoverished people. Informal actors, pushed toward extralegal activities in order to survive, become according to de Soto protagonists of a new capitalist and democratic epic, creators of wealth, and providers of services highly needed in societies suffocated by market anemia and state anomie (de Soto, The Other Path). Could we not transpose these arguments to other transnational neoliberal entrepreneurial ventures, such as arms trafficking, prostitution networks, smuggling of migrants, organ trafficking, drug trafficking, and money laundering? Their dissimilarities, ranging from the extra- or paralegal status of the informal sector to the illicit or criminal nature of transnational traffics, cannot hide that all these practices, in principle economic but laden with social and humanitarian consequences, are interlocking parts of the heterogeneous global regime of labor. Informality is an integral part of the international and transnational division of labor, either as a local response to the rules imposed by globalization and the Washington consensus – as survival strategies or as a mechanism for the social absorption of surplus labor force – or as a perverse device implemented by transnational corporations for creating and capturing cheap labor power through convoluted chains of illegal, extralegal, and paralegal subcontractors (Tokman, Beyond Regulation). The informal sector fulfills a social function, by sustaining communities many times on the verge of disintegration (in many Latin American countries, the informal sector still represents up to 48% of the overall economy and provide employment to 130 million people). Additionally, it subsidizes costs of the formal sector, pushing wages down and guaranteeing an abundant reserve army, while providing services and products at a lower cost and without contractual responsibilities on the part of corporations. Informality –alongside the maquila system and transnational migration – is an integral part of the international and transnational biocapitalist regime of labor. The transnational mega-markets of Ciudad del Este, in Paraguay, and La Salada, in Argentina, where migrants from multiple nationalities converge into sophisticated assemblages of informal and global trading, counterfeiting and contraband, piracy and money laundering that configure what Gustavo Lins Ribeiro (“Other Globalizations”) and Verónica Gago (La razón neoliberal) characterize as a “grass roots globalization” or “neoliberalism from below.” But isn’t this also what the different forms of transnational trafficking mentioned above do? After all, the boundaries between informality, illegality, and flexibility are, at least, fluid. How to distinguish between atypical, transitory, flexible, or informal work, or between freelance and semi-employment, or between voluntary and informal work? What is the difference between the system of child servitude prevailing in Haiti (the restavèk) and the international trafficking of migrant labor – mostly women and children – destined to disappear in sweatshops or in prostitution chains? How to differentiate between sex tourism, so successful in Thailand and Costa Rica, and prostitution networks that provide Western Europe with young Slavs or Brazilians? What is the difference between a sweatshop in Los Angeles where undocumented migrants work under an indentured

Transmigrants as embodiment of biocapitalism 51 labor regime and a maquiladora in El Salvador operated by women who earn 10 dollars in 12–14 hours workdays? What all these activities have in common is their truly global nature and flexible organization in a network that replicates the workings of transnational corporations: organ trafficking, for example, links Israeli entrepreneurs and South African doctors with Brazilian, Turk, or Filipino donors, in one end, who are paid between 1,000 and 10,000 dollars for a kidney, and North American patients, on the other end, who pay up to 200,000 dollars for their organ transplant (ScheperHugues “Biopiracy”). What all these activities have in common is their covert or overt exploitation of the bios. The different variants of human trafficking (organ trafficking, prostitution, smuggling of migrants, slave labor, and so forth) link organized crime and financial capital with the highest biotechnology, world poverty, and the commodification of life and death in the global market. But all these criminal variants of human trafficking and forced labor, which account for millions of people living under some form of slavery, 71% of whom are women and girls, and generate profits of billions of dollars, would not be possible without the money laundering networks, the ultimate financial matrix of biocapitalism, which converts the surplus value extracted directly from the bios in stocks and bonds safely guarded exponentially multiplied in the highest global financial circles. The speed with which bank transfers and other financial operations are carried out – from the Cayman Islands to Rome, from Rome to Tokyo, from Tokyo to London, from London to Wall Street in just a few seconds – facilitates the morphing of bloody money in flows of capital. This is perhaps the most precise and atrocious metaphor of global biocapitalism.

Cosmopolitan citizens and transnational denizens What is the role of transnational migration in the emergence of new forms of citizenship? Because the transmigrant is, as a matter of fact, a meteco, a foreigner who lacks the rights, privileges, guarantees, and obligations of a citizen in a state that despite having lost much of its economic and political sovereignty – including the legal monopoly of violence, nowadays widely privatized – still maintains the authority to grant or deny citizenship. If it is a common place in the liberal tradition to associate market freedom with the democratic system, it has been proven, despite neoliberal – and liberal – tedious claims, that democracy and neoliberalism are, in fact, irreconcilable. As Samuel Huntington himself admits, democracy not only is compatible with economic inequality, but depends on it (“The Hispanic Challenge”). The fallacy lies in confusing the forms of liberal democracy, no matter how empty, with elusive democratic values, and plurality with multiculturalism, which strictly does not claim anything other than managing the coexistence of ethnic minorities and migrant communities within the borders of the nation-state. Multiculturalism, unlike the assimilationist ideologies of traditional nation-states, serves to point out a tolerant and flexible position regarding cultural diversity. However, like assimilation, it imposes a transcendent identity and a certain model of citizenship in order to integrate different ethnic

52 Abril Trigo groups into a national society and a national market. It does not seek to dissolve ethnocultural identities, but to mold them into a new type of multicultural citizenship that subsumes them in state institutions (Kymlicka and Norman, Citizenship in Diverse Societies). In this way, despite the furious opposition being waved on multiculturalism by right-wing nationalists, multicultural policies have never been more than a political mechanism for managing differences, a device for containing social tensions and political antagonisms diverted toward – or reduced to – a predominantly discursive manifestation of the cultural. It has implemented, in other words, a political culture, a new civic model that segments the political sphere to identity politics and an anodyne deference toward difference, eventually contributing to cover up deeper inequalities and more radical alterities under its ideological veil. It would thus amount to a sort of uneasy racism masked behind the politically correct formalities of liberal tolerance (Jameson Postmodernism, 341; Žižek “Multiculturalism,” 37). This is not the place to elaborate on the relationship between multiculturalism, liberalism, civil society, and citizenship (see Trigo Crisis y transfiguración), but it is worth remembering that since the 1970s, civil society became a hinge between neoliberalism and multiculturalism, becoming once again what it had originally been in the high times of nineteenth-century liberalism. At that time, the rights of the citizen, as T.H. Marshall wrote in 1950, did not conflict with the inequalities of capitalist society; they were, on the contrary, necessary to the maintenance of that particular form of inequality. The explanation lies in the fact that the core of citizenship at this stage was composed of civil rights. And civil rights were indispensable to a competitive market economy. They gave to each man, as part of his individual status, the power to engage as an independent unit in the economic struggle and made it possible to deny to him social protection on the ground that he was equipped with the means to protect himself. (Marshall “Citizenship and Social Class,” 150) The political and social rights of modern citizens guaranteed by liberal democracy would come later. We observe today a reconversion of civil society to the neoliberal model and its enshrining of the homo economicus, so that it becomes an instrument of social regulation and ideological diffusion, dispenser of citizenship and administrator of differences, and articulator of antagonisms and guarantor of the multicultural consensus. When the boundaries between the public and the private, the political and the cultural spheres become diluted, then a model of multicultural and cosmopolitan citizenship based on the hedonistic, consumerist, competitive, and entrepreneurial individualism of the homo economicus is enshrined in the global imaginary. This global imaginary entices subaltern social sectors and transmigrants alike in the competition for a seat in the promised banquet. On the one hand, this model of citizenship, which flirts with multiculturalism, interculturality, and human rights (UNESCO Declaración universal, 4-5), consecrates the homo economicus as the apex of

Transmigrants as embodiment of biocapitalism 53 a new form of citizenship, a citizenship that affords unlimited individual freedom and releases individuals from their social and even political responsibilities so that they can focus in pursuing their own personal goals. Perhaps this new form of citizenship is inaugurating a new principle of jus mundi that will come to replace the traditional principles of jus solis and jus sanguinis on which national citizenship has been based up to now. On the other hand, despite the many, timely, and innovative forms of social praxis and political intervention by countless community groups, neighborhood associations, and social and indigenous movements, who demand and exercise new forms of community and solidary citizenship, the illusions that motivate migration will continue to crash against increasingly repressive migratory policies. Transmigrants, with their home in tow and their mortgaged affections, have nothing to do with cosmopolitan citizens. In a cultural climate that rewards the value of mobility and the mobility of values, while capital and cosmopolitan citizens move freely and joyfully worldwide, most of the people remain tied to their local conditions of life, or are lured into migration. As Zigmunt Bauman points out, the world is divided between the globally mobile and those confined to their local circumstances (Globalization: The Human Consequences). In a brief article published in 1993, and inspired by another short text by Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben reflects on how the refugee constitutes something like the zero degree of citizenship, and how the current transmigrant, like the refugee, becomes a sort of second-class citizen, a denizen. He writes: [G]iven the by now unstoppable decline of the Nation-State and the general corrosion of traditional political-juridical categories, the refugee is perhaps the only thinkable figure for the people of our time and the only category in which one may see today – at least until the process of dissolution of the Nation-State and its sovereignty has achieved full completion – the forms and limits of a coming political community. (Agamben “Beyond Human Rights,” 159–160) And then he adds, What industrialized countries face today is a permanently resident mass of noncitizens who do not want to and cannot be either naturalized or repatriated. These noncitizens often have nationalities of origin, but, inasmuch as they prefer not to benefit from their own States’ protection, they find themselves, as refugees, in a condition of de facto Statelessness. Tomas Hammar has created the neologism of “denizens” for these noncitizen residents, a neologism that has the merit of showing how the concept of “citizen” is no longer adequate for describing the social-political reality of modern states. (Agamben “Beyond Human Rights,” 163) In everyday life, the transnational condition is lived by migrants “as a duality: speaking two languages, having two homes in different countries and making

54 Abril Trigo a living across borders” (Portes et al. “The study of transnationalism,” 217). According to a classic definition by Basch, Glick, and Blanc, transnationalism refers to the processes by which migrants forge and maintain bifocal social relations that skip the geographical, cultural, and political boundaries between their localities of origin and the society where they reside (Nations unbound, 8). Torn between the survival in the here-now and the nostalgia of the therethen, the transmigrant lives on shaping a fragmented and heterogeneous subjectivity, unable to synthesize his living experiences without suffering great losses (Trigo Memorias migrantes). Migrancy, in this sense, configures a cultural dimension that exceeds mere geographical translation, and establishes the conditions for the emergence of new forms of subjectivity, a transmigrant subjectivity.

Note 1 Some ideas in the following sections have been published in “Nuevos espacios transnacionales: migraciones, transmigraciones y diásporas” and “El espacio transnacional de la experiencia migrante.”

Works cited Agamben, Giorgio. “Beyond Human Rights.” In Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, eds. Radical Thought In Italy: A Potential Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Aglietta, Michel. A Theory of Capitalist Regulation. The US Experience. London: NLB, 1979 [1976]. Bacon, David. Illegal People. How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Migrants. Boston: Beacon Press, 2008. Basch, Linda, N. Glick Schiller and C.S. Blanc, eds. Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach Science, 1994. Bauman, Zygmunt. Globalization. The Human Consequences. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity, 2000. Bauman, Zygmunt. Society under Siege. London: Polity, 2002. Bustamante, Jorge. “Extreme Vulnerability of Migrants: The Cases of the United States and Mexico”. Georgetown Immigration Law Journal 24 (2010): 565–583. Codeluppi, Vanni. Il biocapitalismo. Verso lo sfruttamento integrale di corpi, cervelli ed emozioni. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri editore, 2008. Coronil, Fernando. “Del eurocentrismo al globocentrismo: la naturaleza del poscolonialismo.” In Edgardo Lander, ed. La colonialidad del saber: eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales. Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela/UNESCO, 2000. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1979. New York: Palgrave-McMillan, 2008 [2004].

Transmigrants as embodiment of biocapitalism 55 Fumagalli, Andrea. “Twenty The Theses on Contemporary Capitalism (Cognitive Biocapitalism).” ANGELAKI Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 16–3 (2011): 7–17. Gago, Verónica. La razón neoliberal. Economías barrocas y pragmática popular. Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón, 2015. Huntington, Samuel. “The Hispanic Challenge.” Foreign Policy (March 2004) http://www .foreignpolicy.com/articles/2004/03/01/the_hispanic_challenge Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. Kennedy, Paul and Victor Roudometoff, eds. Communities across Borders: New Immigrants and Transnational Cultures (Transnationalism). London: Routledge, 2002. Kymlicka, Will and Wayne Norman, eds. Citizenship in Diverse Societies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Lins Ribeiro, Gustavo. Other Globalizations: Alter-Native Transnational Processes and Changes. The Marian and Arthur Edelstein Virtual Library, Working Paper 4, 2006. Marshall, T.H. “Citizenship and Social Class.” In Jeff Manza and Michael Sauder, eds. Inequality and Society. New York: W.W. Norton, 2009. Mezzadra, Sandro and Brett Neilson. Border as Method, or, The Multiplication of Labor. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation. The Political and Economic Origins of our Time. New York: Octagon Books, 1975. Portes, Alejandro, Luis Eduardo Guarnizo y Patricia Landolt. “The Study of Transnationalism: Pitfalls and Promise of an Emergent Field.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 22, no. 2 (1999): 217–237. Quijano, Aníbal. “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality.” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3 (2007): 168–178. Scheper-Hugues, Nancy. “Biopiracy and the Global Quest for Human Organs.” The Bio Politic. Markets in Biology Bodies and Information. NACLA Report on the Americas 39, no. 5 (2006): 14–21. Solimano, Andrés. International Migration in the Age of Crisis and Globalization. Historical and Recent Experiences. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Soto, Hernando de. The Other Path. The Invisible Revolution in the Third World. New York. Harper and Row, 1989. Tokman, Victor, ed. Beyond Regulation: The Informal Economy in Latin America. Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1992. Trigo, Abril. Memorias Migrantes. Testimonios y ensayos sobre la diáspora uruguaya. Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2003. Trigo, Abril. Crisis y transfiguración de los estudios culturales latinoamericanos. Santiago: Editorial Cuarto Propio, 2012. Trigo, Abril. “Nuevos espacios transnacionales: migraciones, transmigraciones y diásporas.” In Marta Casaus and Morna Mcleod, eds. Historia de las culturas políticas en España y América Latina. Vol. 6. América Latina entre el autoritarismo y la democratización, 1930–2012. Zaragoza: Prensas de la Universidad de Zaragoza, 2016, 195–220. Trigo, Abril. “El espacio transnacional de la experiencia migrante.” In Adriana J. Bergero and Silvana Mandolessi, eds. Sujetos, territorios e identidades en tránsito. Nuevo Texto Crítico 30.53 (2019): 62–97. UNESCO. Declaración universal de la UNESCO sobre la diversidad cultural. Montevideo: UNESCO-Ediciones Trilce, 2005.

56 Abril Trigo Valdez, Inés. Socialism and Empire: Labor, Racial Capitalism, and the Global Regulation of Movement. Prepared for presentation at the Pittsburgh Human Rights and Migration Seminar, 2019 (manuscript). Žižek, Slavoj. “Multiculturalism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Multinacional Capitalism.” New Left Review 225 (1997): 28–51.

4

Refuge and deportation The future as property in the border regime Angela Naimou

Deportation orders scramble the long-cultivated imaginings of the future that has informed refugee and immigrant life-worlds. Border regimes claim so much time. The current migration order and its expulsion politics are designed to take time, to steal the wealth and deplete the political imagination in service to racial capitalism. This chapter considers how futurity gets conceived, narrated, and weaponized in stories of diaspora that had marked themselves “safe” from the deportation terror, if only informally, but whose members are transformed in law from having effective or de jure ex-refugee status to becoming deportees. It begins with the recent detention and deportation cases of Iraqi nationals who have made their lives in the United States. The first part of the chapter considers how the temporalities of refuge and deportation converge. It discusses the case of Hamama v. Adducci, a nationwide class-action lawsuit brought by the ACLU of Michigan and Code Legal Aid to challenge the final orders of removal given to more than 1,400 longtime US resident Iraqi nationals since the summer of 2017. As Shahram Khosravi writes, “The deportee’s tomorrow belongs elsewhere.”1 Deportation can mean transformative loss, transformed future, a disruption in continued migration, interminable time held in detention, or it can mean impending death.2 I briefly discuss the story of Jimmy Aldaoud, who was born in Greece as an Iraqi refugee and who lived in the Detroit metro area for most of his life, until he was deported to Najaf, Iraq, and died two months later, in Baghdad. The second part of the chapter discusses refugee and deportee temporalities in the logic of capital. It brings together Mimi Thi Nguyen’s critique of refugee gratitude (as the feeling of perpetual indebtedness to liberal empire for its having given the refugee the gift of freedom) and Khosravi’s thinking of deportation as stolen time, as time and resources accumulated by racialized foreign-born people and taken away from them by the deportation regime. Given time as a “gift of freedom” and “stolen time” as the time of deportation capture one’s future in the language of property. Deportation law itself has relationships with colonial practices and legal slavery. These are temporalities under duress, as Ann Laura Stoler conceives of duress in terms of “colonial effects,” “protracted temporalities,” and “constraints and confinements” of colonial presence: duress as “neither a thing nor an organizing principle so much as a relation to a condition, a pressure exerted, a troubled condition borne in the body, a force exercised on muscles and

58 Angela Naimou mind” (Stoler 7). They are also distressed futures, where distress has relevant but narrower meanings, as when a ship or person calls for immediate intervention, but also in reference to a legal practice of “distrainment,” which referred to seizure of cattle or property to exert pressure on the owner to repay a debt or right a wrong (OED). I redirect these questions of temporality and refugee futurity through the narrative fiction of Hassan Blasim, an Iraqi writer and filmmaker who left his studies in Baghdad for Iraqi Kurdistan during Saddam Hussein’s reign, before Blasim hazarded the clandestine migration routes to reach Finland and gain asylum there. I propose Blasim’s fiction participates in what Ignacio Sánchez Prado theorizes as “anti-world literature”: a “set of formal and ideological stances against the axioms and ideologies of world literature theories and practices” (Sánchez Prado 142). As a political and aesthetic project, “anti-world writing” challenges the “world’s purported utopian promise in any of its guises” by going against the grain of globalization and aesthetic worlding. This concept of anti-world literature draws from theories of world literature but takes as its reference Mexican theorists and modes of literary production that pose challenges to traditions of world literature in theory. Blasim’s short story, “The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes,” specifically tracks a version of refugee gratitude and deportable future in its narration of an Iraqi man who gains asylum in Holland and should have a future of happily-ever-after, except that his former life overtakes his dream space, with fatal consequences. The short story participates in the project of anti-world fiction in confronting the “impossibilities and aporias” of the alternative world-making conventionally the province of postcolonial literature (Sánchez Prado 148). But I also suggest that the short story offers a way to understand the contemporary world literary field in its enduring presence as imperial debris, narrating the nightmarish overlapping realities of border regimes and distressed futures within the story while offering important challenges to the way the literary field contends with the current border regime.

Deportations to Iraq On the weekend of June 11, 2017, ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) arrested 114 Iraqi nationals from the metropolitan Detroit area, many of whom had lived in Michigan for decades or most of their lives, as part of a large Chaldean and Assyrian Christian Iraqui minority community. Most were retroactively sent notice that their supervised releases were revoked due to their “failure to provide Iraqi travel document,” even though ICE is aware that the nationals were consistently unable to attain such documents despite repeated attempts (Motion for Preliminary Injunction, Hamama v. Adducci, 6). Since then, more than 350 have been detained, and about 1,400 permanent legal residents have been affected. Many eventually received relief from removal based on their individual cases. Some have been deported to Iraq, their only identification documents being one-way travel documents that become invalid once

Refuge and deportation 59 the plane lands. Some were harassed by ICE with threats of life in detention and effectively coerced into signing their own removal papers. Before 2017, these low-priority deportation orders for Iraqi nationals had been regarded as defunct in all but name, and most of the people were part of supervised release that required an annual check in with ICE. Iraq was one of the “recalcitrant” or “at risk of non-compliance” states like Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, which resisted repatriating some or all deportees from the United States. The Iraqi government regularly refused to facilitate deportations by processing the required paperwork, pointing to the deportees’ long absence from the country as well as humanitarian concerns for their safety as minorities under threat by sectarian factions and Da’esh. For their part, ICE points to the sudden raids as lawful enforcement of the final orders of removal, enabled by a March 12, 2017, agreement between the United States and Iraq that included dropping Iraq from the travel ban (aka the Muslim Ban, aka “Executive Order 13769, Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States”) in exchange for accepting a number of deportees. Iraqi nationals are a small minority in the deportation regime: but despite the discourse and public protest that point to their exceptionality, these lives are thoroughly enmeshed in the deportation terror and rise of immigration detention, as well as the drug war and its earlier massive increase in drug convictions (a common charge for the Iraqi nationals being drug possession or intent to distribute). Deportation as a technology of state terror overwhelmingly has been practiced on Mexican and Central American nationals, the recipients of “the deportation terror” (Buff 523).3 US immigration control is the “most highly racialized police and penal system in the United States today,” with nationals from Mexico and Central America comprising “97 percent of all deportees and 92 percent of all immigrants imprisoned for unlawful entry” (Lytle Hernández 2).4 Longtime legal residents with criminal records or other historically low-priority removal orders have become increasingly targeted for deportation to countries transformed by colonization and war. Language rides two different legal rails for citizens and noncitizens – “aggravated felonies” in immigration law may not be considered so in criminal law, making low-level offenses triggers for deportation regardless of legal immigration status. Iraqi diasporic communities in Michigan largely were established through regular channels of immigration law, but they nurture strong forms of refugee memory. Under threat of deportation, they also inhabit a kind of refugee futurity. Hundreds of Iraqi American families and allies gathered in protest, their posters featuring images of the crucifix, victims of ISIS (aka Da’esh), words asking Trump to listen to these protestors who had supported him, and signs about time served as rehabilitation. I attended one demonstration in front of the District Courthouse in downtown Detroit on June 15, 2017, in support of the ACLU of Michigan initiation of the class-action habeas corpus petition Hamama v. Aducci. That petition asked for a halt to the deportations so that individuals could have the time needed to seek counsel and resolve their cases in the immigration courts before being deported.

60 Angela Naimou Important to this request for more time was the claim that the US noncitizens were significantly likely to meet the bar for fear of persecution or torture if deported. The petition cited the Immigration and Nationality Act, which prohibits the US government from removing a noncitizen to a country where he or she is more likely than not to face persecution or torture. The petition noted that the INA is consistent with US obligations under the Refugee Act and the Convention against Torture.5 The ACLU later filed a Motion for Preliminary Injunction of Detention Issues asking the District Court to allow the Iraqi nationals to be placed on bond while their cases continue, unless the government could provide a reason for keeping someone in prolonged detention for reasons of security or other criteria. US District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan (Southern Division) Judge Mark A. Goldsmith decided both motions in favor of the petitioners, halting deportations so that Iraqi nationals with final orders of removal on hold could pursue their individual cases in immigration courts. He also ruled that petitioners should not be kept in prolonged detention unless the government showed reason for it. District Judge Goldsmith planned to sanction the government for lying and misleading the court by submitting false declarations stating that repatriation was imminent.6 These legal victories of Hamama v. Adducci acknowledged a detention regime that significantly disrupted people’s ordinary futures at work or with family, and delayed them from seeking avenues of relief that were legally open to them, which themselves were enormously costly and time-consuming, as Appellate Judge Helene White would go on to emphasize in her 2018 dissenting minority opinion. Documents showed the government used harassment, intimidation, and arbitrary and prolonged detention, putting pressure on the detainees to agree to their own deportation when the United States could not succeed with the Iraqi government. The struggle was from the start about freedom over immigrants’ future time: where to live it and how to use it. In December 2018 – the same month when the Remain in Mexico policy, aka The Migrant Protection Protocols, was announced – the US Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down Goldsmith’s two to one, ruling on the contention that all federal courts lacked jurisdiction over such cases involving habeas corpus in immigration law. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals’ majority opinion also argued against the immigrant deportees’ rights. The appeals court ruling affirmed that no length of time or evidence of good behavior would mitigate the petitioners’ ultimate foreigner status: “Though many of these Iraqi nationals had come to expect that the execution of their removals would never materialize, they had been living in the United States on borrowed time,” the appeals court ruling said (Hamama v. Adducci, 6th Cir., 3). It pointed to the theoretical possibility that these nationals could have sought legal adjustment of their status decades earlier – a claim dissenting Appellate Judge White describes as disingenuous, as there are many reasonable barriers and new risks in doing so unless deportation becomes imminent (Hamama v. Adducci, 6th Cir., Dissenting Opinion, 16–21).

Refuge and deportation 61 What kind of “borrowed time” is this? Who is the lender and why is the debt being called in now, or at all? A key argument in the class-action lawsuit Hamama v. Aducci is that the detained Iraqi nationals would have a credible fear of persecution were they to be deported to Iraq. Extensive supporting expert testimony and records were supplied to explain that “while some individuals will face particular threats based on their religion, ethnic identity, political affiliation or other factors, all American-affiliated Iraqis face a significant risk of persecution and torture if removed” (Hamama v. Adducci Petitioners/Plaintiffs’ Reply, 8). Judge Goldsmith had agreed that the risks to life were significant. Appellate Judge White’s subsequent dissenting opinion also agreed that the petitioners presented credible evidence that they were likely to be killed or tortured if deported: The government did not contest this evidence, and the majority does not find fault with the district court’s findings that without a stay, deportations would commence immediately, with death, torture, and persecution probably resulting. Instead, the majority faults Petitioners for failing to file motions to reopen earlier. Yet there are good reasons for Petitioners’ failure to do so. (Hamama v. Adducci, 6th Cir., Dissenting Opinion, 21) There are questions not welcome in immigration court cases: What does your time and your body mean to the state that argues for your deportation in the face of your dread of persecution, torture, and likely death? Why is anything less than fear of future persecution or torture an inadequate defense from deportation? How does the international border regime depend on the expression of state sovereignty as future-oriented control over borders, where the state and its agencies use the language of security, risk, or discretion to invent the rules of the game, to shift countless burdens onto the denizens captured into playing, and to demonstrably break their own rules without repercussion? Jimmy Aldaoud was a man from the Detroit area and a friend of some of my cousins, though I never knew him. He was born in 1978 in a refugee camp in Greece to parents with Iraqi nationality: under the citizenship laws of Greece, he was given Iraqi nationality though he’d never lived there. He arrived as a 6-month-old infant to Michigan, where he would be diagnosed with diabetes as a child and was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. He had difficulty managing his mental and physical health, as evinced in his list of petty criminal offenses, his father’s frequent calling of police on him when they fought, and his occasionally being houseless. In June 2019, he was put on a plane by ICE agents and dumped at the Najaf airport in Iraq. His sister got a call from a panicked Iraqi immigration officer worried about Jimmy’s safety in Najaf in Southern Iraq, far from Chaldean support networks. Aside from a small supply of insulin, ICE claims ensured “continuity of care,” what he experienced was a terrifying discontinuity. Aldaoud had none of the documents necessary to travel within the state or integrate into society, no access to health care he needed; he had no knowledge of Arabic, indeed had

62 Angela Naimou no real connections to the place. Aldaoud had advocates beyond his family: a Michigan Senator, US-based lawyers and advocates, and a lawyer in Iraq assisting deportees rushed by the United States and thus without Iraqi ID papers. A member of the Iraqi parliament even asked a local Chaldean Catholic priest in Baghdad to contact Aldaoud. The priest invited him to the Internally Displaced Persons camp he operated, but in a video reflecting on Aldaoud’s plight, he says that Aldaoud declined: “he chose another path,” that of trying to convince the US government to let him return home. Aldaoud earlier had posted his own widely circulated video to Facebook: I’ve been in the United States since six months old, you know. And just two and a half weeks ago, an immigration agent pulled me over and said, you’re going to Iraq. And I refused, I said I’ve never been there, I’ve been in this country my whole life, pretty much since birth. … They just wouldn’t listen to me, they wouldn’t let me call my family, nothing. They just said, you’re going to Iraq, and your best bet is to cooperate with us, that way we’re not gonna chain you up, we’ll put you on a commercial flight. … I’m here now, and I don’t understand the language, basically I been sleeping in the street, I’m diabetic … I been throwing up sleeping in the street, trying to find something to eat. (Aldaoud) Like other refugees who became long-term residents only to be deported, he was thrown into a future of punitive abandonment. For him it was Najaf 2019, dying two months later in Baghdad. His sisters made a statement in response to news of his death: “Jimmy was a sweet person with a good heart. … We hope Jimmy’s story opens people’s eyes and hearts. … We should not be deporting people to their death overseas” (Padilla). I don’t know how Jimmy’s childhood as a refugee affected his life, his health problems, or his police record. Only some of the Chaldeans and other Iraqi nationals threatened with deportation were refugees as Jimmy Aldaoud was when he arrived in the United States. But all of them must now inhabit a refugee-like future, as legal teams argue in court over their fear of persecution and death in order to keep them from being displaced from a home that threatens to expel them as foreigners for having made this place a home, yes, but only on “borrowed time.”

Given time, stolen time Mimi Thi Nguyen theorizes refuge within broader imperial formations through her study of the freighted relation of refugee figures and war and necropolitical futures. She considers how the position of the Vietnamese refugee within post2001 liberal empire was organized by the structure of debt, in which the resettled refugee has been given the “gift of freedom” and in gratitude seeks to make good on what the gift truly is – a debt. Nguyen enfolds the thought of Foucault and Derrida, extending the conceptual possibility of Derrida’s “given time” to

Refuge and deportation 63 consider how the resettled refugee is granted a future but as a political debt to the state, in which time is converted into freedom. Having received the gift, the war refugee is then perpetually trying to do the impossible, to pay back the debt. Liberal empire thus provides “imperial hospitality,” and in exchange the refugee feels indebted.7 The refugee patriot is encapsulated in the political work of Viet D. Dinh, an architect of the Patriot Act whose personal history as a Vietnamese refugee child was celebrated and cited as a reason for his desire to work on the 2001 USA Patriot Act.8 The grateful refugee, feeling perpetually indebted to the state, transforms themselves into refugee patriots: in this way, Cold War temporal politics find their way into current global orders such as the so-called war on terror. A temporality of refugee gratitude encounters a temporality of deportation. Strange temporalities emerge from this relationship between giver and receiver of the gift of freedom, as former refugees enlist themselves in maintaining future wars and borders.9 Former refugees, or their children, enlist to fight “future Vietnams” even as they describe the haunting sense that the military has thrown them back into the time of Vietnamization, in a new site and with a different cast. Refugee diaspora becomes the “target and the instrument” of the gift of freedom: not only are they central to the “we-win-even-when-we-lose” narrative of rescuing Vietnamese refugees from Communism, but they also become the instruments for the targeting of future populations first marked for devastating US violence and subsequently transformed into the objects of US aid and rescue (Espiritu 174). In some sense, it is not merely the refugee figure but the idea of the future itself that becomes both target and instrument of international war and migration strategies. The deportation regime steals time: for example, it is the theft of wages already earned and would-have-been earned, and the intergenerational wealth stolen. State agencies and private businesses together get in on the deportation grift: counties, ICE, CoreCivic, the Geo Group, or the bail bond company named Libre that targets Latino detainees and extorts them with high fees and an electronic shackle on their ankles, making detainees pay with interest for their time under continued tracking, surveillance, and confinement outside detention centers. Deportability is the time of ordinary living that the state can steal or remove to another place at any future moment. The deportation order is a deliberately belated exclusion, a spectacularized punishment performing the promise of sovereign authority and national purity even as it is an act that is thoroughly international and transnational. It is part of the “wars on mobility,” what Achille Mbembe describes in another context as “wars whose aim is to turn discounted bodies into borders.” It weaponizes time in the bodies of detainees and seizes control over the temporal process of everyday life (s/p). Diasporic imaginaries built on refugee and immigrant gratitude for having been given “the gift of freedom” reinforce ideological attachments to the promise of US liberal empire. The Iraqi Chaldean diaspora in the United States has formed much of itself through those attachments. There is an opportunity to challenge this ideological core that I think has interfered with more liberatory, daring political

64 Angela Naimou imaginings of what human collectivities that confront bordered up ideas of nationality and law can mean and do in the world.

Anti-world writing and imperial debris In an interview for his UK publisher Comma Press, Blasim recounts the moment when he was invited by his publisher to visit the UK and was subjected to embassy interviews and scrutiny. He had already gained asylum in Finland by that time. Encapsulating the paradox of transnational imperial wars and militarized border regimes, Blasim narrates the complex pressures that are then exerted onto the storytelling process for refugee and asylum cases. Consider the opening frame narrative of his short story “The Reality and the Record”: Everyone staying at the refugee reception center has two stories – the real one and the one for the record. The stories for the record are the ones the new refugees tell to obtain the right to humanitarian asylum, written down in the immigration department and preserved in their private files. The real stories remain locked in the hearts of the refugees, for them to mull over in complete secrecy. That’s not to say it’s easy to tell the two stories apart. They merge and it becomes impossible to distinguish them. (Blasim, 155) Blasim’s rueful jokes on refugee and migrant futures are antihumanitarian challenges to state and transnational cruelty. Blasim’s writings do not make a humanitarian plea to grant refugees better futures – they show you the violence of a world where some get to decide with impunity and others are consigned to plead. Nadia Atia notes in her reading of the quotation above that the word for “stories” in the original Arabic is hakawat, in the Arabic tradition of “fabulous and phantasmagoric fables,” rather than merely “stories” (Atia 323). The fantastical resides here, as the narrator goes on to merge the two stories into an impossible reality, but the short stories also call up a critical tradition of cynicism in Iraqi political jokes about dictatorship that are here redirected to humanitarian militarism and the state it has destroyed. Lori Allen’s discussion of cynicism in Palestinian human rights work as potentially hopeful resonates here, as a concept meant to “evoke the sense of shared disappointment and ‘fed-upness’… that is anchored in the memory of and desire for better political conditions” (Allen 26). Sánchez Prado theorizes an anti-world literature as contemporary writing that confronts the “necropolitical present” conceptually, aesthetically, and politically. This anti-world literature is not another word for dystopic – they are stories that linger on the horrors of violence as violations, temporal, spatial, corporeal, ecological, that are a version of realism, tuned with more intensity, almost as if one’s nightmare is reality in techno-color. Iraq and Mexico resonate with each other and become imprecise analogies for each other, triangulated by US imperial violence and resource extraction, where necropolitical power inflicts maximum dispossession and death on entire populations. There is a unity of large-scale structures of

Refuge and deportation 65 global migration politics and the temporal experience of migration for the people whose futures come into contact and conflict with the global migration order. As an ambivalent part of the imperial debris that I suggest is the world literary system itself, “The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes” opens a way out of refugee patriotism or deportee-as-refugee positions that the border regime constructs. Through horror temporalities and a bifurcation of privileged and unprivileged forms of writing, as I’ll very briefly note below, Blasim’s work has affinities with Mexican writer and literary theorist Cristina Rivera Garza’s conception of necroescrituras in its engagement with the “aesthetic and political consequences of necropolitics for literary writing” and with the paradigmatic shift to digital writing (Sánchez Prado 150). A key stance in this anti-world literature is to challenge the privileged world literary system in favor of unprivileged forms – communal or collaborative writing, nonfiction or cross-genre writing, poetics of found language, and writing outside the novel form. Blasim provides his own style of unprivileged and privileged forms: he publishes the Arabic stories online, releasing his writing from censorship and language from the logic of property (what Rivera Garza calls a poetics of depropriation). He also writes in Arabic amiyya, the language of ordinary life or the street, instead of the formal language of education and traditional register of serious Arabic literature. He now is a Finnish citizen writing in Arabic whose work does not become part of the Arabic print publishing market and whose writing has not been recognized as Finnish. Even so, Blasim’s writing has vaulted into the circuits of contemporary global fiction. Beyond posting his stories on a personal website so that his stories circulate easily and freely, without Arabic publishing houses, translations by Jonathan Wright and publications in English have been as vital to his success as his uncanny uses of genre fiction, which highlight temporalities honed in gothic, horror, dystopia, speculative, sci-fi, and fantasy fiction but then channeled into fiction of Iraq in its immediate past, present, and futures (the future being the one thematic constraint in his anthology Iraq + 100). Blasim resists his work’s potential world literary marketing as “magical realism,” half-jokingly calling his own work “nightmare realism.” The “Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes” begins with a variant on a theme in other post-2003 fiction set in Baghdad, including Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad: the picking up of body parts after explosions. It then proceeds with Cortázar-Borges-Fuentes momentum, in the key of “nightmare realism.” Salim Abdul Husain worked for the municipality cleaning streets until he finds a special ring on a finger. Soon he’s in Holland where he gains asylum and a new name that he didn’t know was famous but that sounded like a nice way to evoke his brownness as Latinness in his new country. Carlos Fuentes takes Dutch language classes and promises himself not to speak Arabic or “mix with Arabs or Iraqis” ever again. Throwing himself full tilt into political gratitude, he praises everything good as uniquely Dutch and abhors everything bad as distinctly Iraqi. “Every day he made progress in burying his identity and his past. He always scoffed at the immigrants and other foreigners who did not respect the rules of

66 Angela Naimou Dutch life and who complained all the time” (Blasim, Corpse Exhibition 189). Carlos felt he is the only one who deserved to be adopted by this compassionate and tolerant country, and that the Dutch government should expel all those who did not learn the language properly and anyone who committed the slightest misdemeanor, even crossing the street in violation of the safety code. Let them go shit there in their shitty countries. (Blasim, Corpse Exhibition 190) He marries a Dutch woman and invents his past as the son of a Mexican oil engineer who worked in Iraq. He is grateful immigrant, he has contempt for other immigrants, he is one of Nguyen’s “refugee patriots”: “Yes,” he says, “give me a country that treats me with respect, so that I can worship it all my life and pray for it” (Blasim, Corpse Exhibition 191). What breaks down for Carlos is his dreamtime, i.e., the time he cannot maintain the suppression of himself as Salim. There his repression finds freedom despite himself, throwing him into Iraqi dreamscapes of the poor district where he was born or making him speak Iraqi Arabic to defend himself in Dutch courts. Nightmare versions of the self he suppressed escalate, despite trying every outlandish thing to get the nightmares to stop. Eventually, he dreams he is Carlos Fuentes and that he is Salim Abdul Husain: and just as Carlos begins to shoot wildly to finally kill him off, Salim jumps out of the window. In the end, Dutch newspapers identify the dead Carlos Fuentes as “an Iraqi man” rather than “a Dutch national” (Blasim, Corpse Exhibition 196). The narration suggests he could forgive the Dutch: “But,” it says, “he will never forgive his brothers, who had his body taken back to Iraq and buried in the cemetery in Najaf” (Ibid.). The story closes with a reference to the mysterious ring, which is lost and found as a linked motif across the short stories in the collection: here in a picture taken of CarlosSalim’s partially shrouded body on the sidewalk, it “glowed red in the foreground, like a sun in hell” (Ibid.). Salim finds a false escape route using the logic of property: he finds the ring and keeps it; his cousin in France mentions the name of Carlos Fuentes and he decides to take it for his own. The name of Fuentes, though, may operate like imperial debris not only of empire but of the world literary system – Fuentes being one of the last Mexican writers to have been vaulted into the world literary market. Salim doesn’t like to read literature – but if he had read Fuentes’ The Death of Artemio Cruz, he might have realized that he is like and unlike Artemio Cruz, who reflects on his life through memories on his deathbed, with a transcendent narrator-author mercilessly narrating Cruz’s internal putrefaction as his memories flash to show us a life lived in violence and for profit, with the secrets Artemio never fully reckoned with erupting into the novel in its final pages. I’ve talked about futurity as ideas of time stolen, delayed, distressed. In Blasim’s story, Salim/Carlos is posthumously returned to Iraq against his will – he is dead, but the narration notes that he “will never forgive” his brothers for

Refuge and deportation 67 arranging that he be buried in the cemetery in Najaf (Ibid.). Najaf is a sacred city, a burial site visited by Shi’ite Muslim pilgrims and also among the largest cemeteries in the world, the Wadi-us-Salaam (‫مالسلا يداو‬‎) or “Valley of Peace.” It is a city of the dead and has been so for over 1,400 years. Najaf was captured by US forces early in the 2003 invasion, and the cemetery swelled from the violence. This also means it is a city where the living must contend with what the poplitics of death means for collective life. Najaf is also where Jimmy Aldaoud’s brief time in Iraq began. When he died, his sisters arranged for his body to be brought to the United States to be mourned in the Mother of God Chaldean Catholic Church in Southfield, Michigan, laid to rest next to his mother in the cemetery nearby.

Notes 1 Shahram Khosravi, “Stolen Time,” Radical Philosophy, RP 20.3 (2018), n.p. https:// www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/stolen-time 2 See Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz’s essay in this volume for a discussion of post-deportation activism and supportive communities in Mexico. 3 Buff refers to a 1950 pamphlet by Agner Green, “The Deportation Terror: A Weapon to Gag America.” 4 The most dramatic expansions in mandatory detention and deportation have drawn upon the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) and the 1996 Illegal Immigration and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA). The 2001 USA Patriot Act reorganized and expanded detention and deportation targets. 5 See Jessica Zhang, “Hamama v. Adducci: Narrowing Habeas Relief for Immigrants in Removal Proceedings” in Lawfare website. April 10, 2019. https://www.lawfareblog.c om/hamama-v-adducci-narrowing-habeas-relief-immigrants-removal-proceedings 6 For unsealed documents, see https://www.aclumich.org/en/hamama-v-adducci-secret -documents-released For Goldsmith ruling, see also: https://www.aclumich.org/sites/default/files/wysiw yg/judge_goldsmith_ruling_to_release_iraqi_nationals.pdf 7 Nguyen, 135. See also Nguyen on repayment in the form of reparations that Iraq has been making to US corporations (M Nguyen 235, En126). 8 Dinh left the Bush administration for a university position in 2003. See Nguyen, 133– 178. 9 See Bui, The Returns of War.

Bibliography ACLU of Michigan. Hamama v. Adducci. Secret Documents Released. https://www.acl umich.org/en/hamama-v-adducci-secret-documents-released Aldaoud, Jimmy. Video Statement Uploaded to Facebook. 2019. https://www.facebook .com/2228632/videos/10111835012432033/ Allen, Lori. The Rise and Fall of Human Rights Cynicism and Politics in Occupied Palestine. Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2013. Atia, Nadia. “The Figure of the Refugee in Hassan Blasim’s ‘The Reality and the Record.’” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 54, no. 3 (2019): 1–15. Blasim, Hassan. An Interview with Hassan Blasim. With Comma Press, June 6, 2013. https ://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYjhwGMeg88

68 Angela Naimou Blasim, Hassan. “The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes.” In The Corpse Exhibition: And Other Stories of Iraq. New York: Penguin, 2014, p. 185. Buff, Rachel Ida. “The Deportation Terror.” American Quarterly 60, no. 3 (2008): 523–51. Bui, Long T. Returns of War: South Vietnam and the Price of Refugee Memory. New York: New York University Press, 2018. Espiritu, Yến Lê. Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es). Oakland: University of California Press, 2014. Hamama v. Adducci, 19–1080 (6th Cir. Dec 20, 2018). Harvey, David. “The ‘New’ Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession.” Socialist Register 40 (2004): 63–87. Hernández, Kelly Lytle. City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Khosravi, Shahram. “What do we see if we Look at the Border from the Other Side?” Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 27, no. 3 (2019): 409–424. Mbembe, Achille and Torbjørn Tumyr Nilsen. “Thoughts on the Planetary: An Interview with Achille Mbembe.” New Frame, 5 Sep 2019. https://www.newframe.com/thoughts -on-the-planetary-an-interview-with-achille-mbembe/ Motion for a Prelim. Injunct. on Detention Issues, Hamama v. Adducci, 2:17-cv-11910 (2017). Nguyen, Mimi Thi. The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012. Opinion & Order Granting Petitioners’ Renewed Motion for Preliminary Injunction, Hamama v. Adducci, Case 2:17-cv–11910-MAG-DRG ECF No. 490 (2018). Padilla, Mariel. “Body of Michigan Man Deported to Iraq Is Returned to the U.S.” The NY Times. 31 August 2019, updated 1 Sept 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/31/us /jimmy-aldaoud-iraq-deport.html Petitioners/Plaintiffs’ Reply in Support of Petitioners/Plaintiffs’ Motion for a Prelim. Stay of Removal and/or Prelim. Injunction, Hamama v. Adducci, 2:17-cv–11910-MAGDRG. (2017). Sánchez Prado, Ignacio M. “Writing the Necropolitical: Notes Around the Idea of Mexican Anti-World Literature.” In Burns, L. and Muth, K. (Eds.), World Literature and Dissent. London: Routledge, 141–160. Stoler, Ann Laura. Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Ty, Michelle. “Trash and the Ends of Infrastructure.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 61, no. 4 (Winter 2015): 606–630, 607. Zavala, Oswaldo. “Imagining the U.S.-Mexico Drug War: The Critical Limits of Narconarratives.” Comparative Literature 66, no. 3 (1 September 2014): 340–360. Zhang, Jessica. “Hamama v. Adducci: Narrowing Habeas Relief for Immigrants in Removal Proceedings” Lawfare. April 10, 2019. https://www.lawfareblog.com/hamama-v-add ucci-narrowing-habeas-relief-immigrants-removal-proceedings

5

At the border of sight States, the civil contract, and Bracero Program photos1 Deborah Cohen

Looking at this photo, what do you notice? First, the spray encircling the man’s head, then his bare chest and the silver canister doing the work; and possibly that the fog of the spray is reaching the otherwise invisible man next in line (Figure 5.1). Next, you pull back your gaze to take in the entire photo: the men, all unclothed save the sprayer, are lined up awaiting this disinfectant – DDT; and the sprayer is the only one protected by mask. Shifting the focus from the bracero-official interaction to the man two places behind, his face is visible, perhaps communicating stoicism; even the man being doused appears less disgusted and more resolute. These men – Mexican bakers, farmers, teachers; the poor, the unemployed; the professional, the lowly manual laborer – came to work. This photo, by Leonard Nadel, was published in 1957 in a magazine spread on the Bracero Program, a 22-year series of US-Mexican agreements (1942–1964) under which Mexican men – braceros – were brought to labor in US fields due to an ostensible labor shortage at the start of World War II. Accompanied by the caption braceros are “‘livestock … herded into lines for mass examination, into booths for mass fumigation, into buses for mass transportation’” (Nadel, qtd. by Toffoli, 127), it was one of hundreds taken in 1956, nearing the end of the program, by the leftleaning Nadel, whose previous work on the hardships of residents of Los Angeles slums had as their goal to educate its audience on the abuses of the program and of farm labor in general. For Nadel, documentary photography was “a means to call attention to social contradictions and human suffering” through “‘visual impact of a sensitive and honest portrayal’” (Loza and González, 113). His photography, labeled “propagandistic” because of its “technique” and objects of “focus,” made clear his leftist political commitments (Guidotti-Hernández, 275). “[P]ower, legibility, and desire,” contends Guidotti-Hernández, “produc[e]” braceros’ “lack of leisure within [the U.S.] domestic sphere.” According to Erica Toffoli (127-28), some photo-essays “justif[ied] the program as … class uplift,” hiding “braceros’ political agency” and agriculture’s “perpetuation of inequality and expropriation,” while Nadel’s offered braceros a way to “subtly assert … alternate political subjectivities” by “communicating their grievances to those who consumed the products of their labor.” Braceros, she contends “protested capitalism’s enduring

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Figure 5.1 Braceros being fumigated with DDT at US border. Leonard Nadel, 1956, Smithsonian Institution. Permission NMAH 2004.0138.08.26.

structural conditions and its impact on laboring subjects” – they resisted. For her, Nadel’s photos helped publicize a narrative farmworker abuse and broader conditions of class (race and gender) exploitation in the fields. The Hermanos Mayo (May Day “Brothers”) also photographed braceros; a collective of three (of five) Republican activists who had fled Spain’s Civil War, first to France and, in 1939, for Mexico. The Hermanos shot almost 400 program photos, some of which, like Nadel’s, appeared in newspapers and magazines consumed by the middle class (Mraz 1996, np.). They made “workers’ art” focused on “uncovering the relations within the [photographic] frame” and acknowledging they had been “‘emigrants for political reasons and [braceros] … [for] hunger’” (qtd. by Mraz, np.). Still, the Brothers’ own experiences of alienation and deprivation brought a “particular optic” as “leftist political refugees” and “daily labor[ers]” to their camera. Mraz (Mraz, np.) sees the Hermanos’ photos – of men standing around, smiling, leaving, sitting; of women crying; of couples hugging – as braceros “interact[ing]” with the camera. Despite acknowledging that braceros were “making something out of what is being made of them,” Mraz reads the photos as confirming braceros’ (and the Hermanos’) resistance and the program itself as exploitation and abuse. Like Nadel who shot to publicize program horrors, the Hermanos saw the “inhumanity” of their own refugee experiences in what braceros had to go through (Mraz, np.). I too see the program as built on a system of exploitation, yet also recognize that braceros, like most poor Mexicans, already lived within overlapping repressive structures – state, local, familial (Cohen; Becker; McCormick). And still they grew up, courted, worked, started families, lost loved ones, rejoiced, and died (Cohen, Rosas, Loza). Braceros showed their many emotions in photos, not just

At the border of sight 71 resistance. Men used the photographic “space” (Smith, 167), I argue, to communicate not just anger or resistance, but their range of inner life as they, as individuals, became part of collectivities of braceros and of the nation. Though not addressing borders in the sense that most of this volume’s essays do, my analysis of the photos allows a “recognition” (Smith, 175) of braceros as full humans with multiple emotions expressed as emergent from, and analyzable within, the context of their struggles and historical conditions.

The structures of the Bracero Program: gender and modernization The Bracero Program was grounded in both the transnational relationship between the United States and Mexico and in each state’s relationship with its citizens. In 1942, when the program began, the United States was involved in a war that required domestic rationing and a realignment of its labor force; by the 1950s, however, it was a global hegemon, supporting a state-enforced domestic racial hierarchy, while spreading (white) liberal, thoroughly capitalist, democracy abroad. Mexico, in contrast, was a young revolutionary state; its rhetoric proclaimed protection and advocacy for all citizens. While much has been written on its failure, inability, or unwillingness to live up to these promises, these ideas structured braceros’ initial belief that the state would advocate for them and shaped reactions when it didn’t (López; Mraz; Hershfield; Vaughan & Lewis; Craib; Joseph, Rubenstein, & Zolov; Vaughan). Moreover, because the state was young, men did not always think of themselves in national terms first; they became national in interactions with Mexican officials and border guards (Cohen). The program began during a shift in US-Mexican relations. In 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt ushered in the “Good Neighbor Policy,” which changed the official US stance from one of interventionism to that of mutual respect and cooperation. Mexico, too, had changed, not just because of the Revolution but President Lázaro Cárdenas’1938, nationalization of oil fields previously owned by foreign companies, including Standard Oil. Cárdenas offered remuneration but these companies refused; they considered the compensation inadequate. The US had an impetus to resolve the issue when it entered the war and sought Mexico’s support. Given this new orientation, the US was open to a labor program based in partnership. Mexico said no, due to the discrimination and earlier deportations its citizens had faced. When former (and new) migrants headed north as the US economy improved, Mexico recognized the advantage of a regulated program. It began with some negotiating clout, which would dissipate as the promise of an expanding Mexican economy wouldn’t happen rapidly enough and more and more men sought to go. The stated goals of the program were to turn Mexican peasants into modern workers while improving US-Mexican relations – no longer would out-migrants be an embarrassment to the country, these “ambassadors” for the nation were “future model citizens” (Cohen, 35). As men were told, “You are … representatives of Mexico in the U.S. Be an example of honesty and show what good

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workmen you [can be]” (Cohen, 93). Regardless of men’s reasons for migrating, the program’s modernizing logic conferred on those chosen a significant honor, for Mexican officials would only choose for this work those deemed to become model citizens. Access to and availability of work undergirded the notion of model citizen, itself a gendered notion of respect and authority. Only a man able to fulfill his roles as head of household was a “good community member” and “man of respect,” where respect was “the social esteem” extended to men deemed “honorable.” Honor, therefore, formed “the basis for the legitimacy of men’s status and authority” in “the domestic domain” and “the public sphere of community life” (Cohen, 74–75). Marriage, then, was the principal vehicle through which a man secured full personhood, rights to adventure – sexual and otherwise – and participation as a full-fledged community member. Yet it also limited poor, working-class, and peasant men because they were unable to provide for families (Cohen, 74–75). As the state publicly implied, US work held out the promise of being able to support families and (re)gain manhood. This public rhetoric, then, about the program framed how braceros understood it. They used the moment of the photo to mitigate the structures of stoop labor that stripped them of authority and independence, the non-family living arrangements that forced them into doing so-called women’s work, and the non-consensual nature of the documentary photography. Instead of resistance or anger, Photo 1 might depict men’s resolve to (re)secure the privileges of manhood and communicate their own aims for the journey. In so doing, they (re)made the border between braceros and non-migrants.

Reading the photos: picturing the civil contract, delineating the journey Reading the Nadel and the Hermanos archives together allows the see-ability of a broader set of emotions and demands, and the growing divide between braceros and non-migrants, Mexicans and Americans. The photos are compelling, and we as viewers are compelled to look. Scholars Noam Leshem and Lauren Wright call out critics, like Michael Fried, who have minimized this desire in favor of a more aesthetic position in their analysis of a photograph’s power (117). For Fried, photographs are art and, as art, any analysis should thus be circumscribed to the aesthetic realm. While photographers, like artists, must and do consider the viewer’s perspective of their work, Fried allocates to viewers no responsibility to act because the photograph doesn’t directly address them; rather, the artist’s motivations and visions are key. In contrast to Fried are the insights of Ariella Azoulay (2012) and Shawn Michelle Smith. Azoulay focuses on our need to look and demands that we as viewers “judge both the ethics of the photographic situation and that of our relation to the people pictured” (Azoulay, “Interview,” np.). She challenges the so-called victim photography of Susan Sontag that limits the viewer’s response to empathy for the suffering (or happiness) of the victimized subject.

At the border of sight 73 Instead, Azoulay lays out a more expansive set of considerations by insisting on the relationship between photographer, photographed subjects, and photograph spectator. This relationship is a “civil contract,” a relationship that exists outside the state’s power to determine and mediate it (Azoulay, “Interview”; my emphasis). Outside state control, she stresses, the photo has the potential to erase the hierarchy between citizens and noncitizens, and open new, more horizontal lines of solidarity. Not only are new ties and forms of belonging created, but these ties must produce action to ameliorate this suffering in the social world. The civil contract demands action, not just Sontag’s anger or empathy. Smith, building on Azoulay, uses this photographic “space” as a site in which these three subjects can “meet as citizens” across actual territorial lines in a “process of mutual recognition” (Smith, 167 and 175), in turn, challenging the very hierarchies between Nadel/the Hermanos, braceros, and viewers. Their mutual recognition as citizens demands not just alleviating braceros’ suffering but, a la Smith (167, 175), of seeing the range of emotions braceros held. I suggest that Azoulay’s concept of the photographic relationship offers a way of reading the Nadel photos as part of braceros’ struggle to claim and fulfill this agentive subjectivity. I follow Christopher Pinney’s contention that a photo is never (just) indexed to particular material referents. As he describes it, “[n]o matter how precautionary and punctilious the photographer is in arranging everything placed before the camera, the inability of the lens to discriminate will ensure [that a] … subversive code [is] present in every photographic image, [which] makes it open and available to other readings” and, in Azoulay’s conception, relationships. Shifting between cultural contexts, he says, “subjects [the photo] to movements that produce a rearrangement and recoding” (Pinney, 3, 6). That is, spectators read what the photo says through their own specific cultural, historical, and locational context. Yet as she insists with her triadic photographic relationship, they aren’t in sole control of the reading, for it is produced through the photographic relationship, of which braceros’ cultural values, mores, and aims for the journey were critical. That is, “the still photograph begins to move, and though this motion cannot erase inequality, it can trouble oppression that might otherwise seem intractable” (Sentilles, np.). Looking at the Nadel and Hermanos photos, we can see the ways migrants were transformed into braceros and into Mexicans, and their communication of that transformation. Figure 5.2 is a Nadel shot in front of the Ministry of Foreign Relations in Mexico City. Aspiring braceros, just beginning the selection process, are lined up for the chance to compete for a space; they wait patiently in an array of poses – hands in pockets, arms crossed; some face the camera, others are positioned perpendicular to it. Dressed in loose-fitting pants and work shirts, several with narrow belts visible, these men vie for a bracero spot. Men’s interaction with the camera – they’re returning the gaze – suggests expectation and hopefulness; though they might be bored standing around, missing families, the future possibility of maintaining families – braceros’ goal for the journey – at least partially negated the boredom and hassles.

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Figure 5.2 Aspiring braceros await selection, Mexico City. Leonard Nadel, 1956, Permission NMAH 2004.0138.08.26.

Figure 5.3 Wife/mother hugging husband/son as he goes off on the bracero journey. Hermanos Mayo, 1943, Mexico. Permission Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico.

At the border of sight 75 Interestingly, while most men in this photo express stoicism, one man is smiling. Media scholar Christina Kotchemidova contends that smiling for the camera is a learned behavior, one which, for the United States, “Kodak played a leadership role in shaping.” It, she says, “did an enormous amount of work to [link] photography with celebrations,” happiness, and fun. … ‘With the growth of the picture magazines [such as Life and Look], th[is] picture culture [slowly] took over’” and, by World War II, was the norm (3-4, 8, 9). That this man is smiling marks a visible connection with Nadel and a willingness to use photo moment to express his own ends. We could, then, read the man’s smiling as “a sign of selfpossession that establishes one’s capacity for self-governance” (Smith, 186), a self-possession in the other men’s expressions and stances. Most either have arms crossed or hands in pockets, with one leg bent and hip lowered; this stance implies control, authority, and claim to space, an agentive – and thus, masculine – position. Through the photo interactions, they claim what had been tenuous – their manhood and thus subjectivity as full Mexican citizens. Figures 5.3 and 5.4, Hermanos shots from 1943, show already-selected men ready to board or on the train northward. Men are interacting with peers and their women folk; they’re saying goodbye to families before they head north. Figure 5.3 shows a woman crying, her arms around her husband, whereas in Figure 5.4 women’s appearance outside the train, tenderly shaking hands with their loved one, marked them as apart from the journey. The two men hanging out the window aren’t looking at the camera; but several other braceros smile broadly, one acknowledging the photographer. In this recognition, he could, within limits,

Figure 5.4 Husbands/sons and wives/mothers saying good-bye as men head off to the United States. Hermanos Mayo, 1943. Mexico. Permission Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico.

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portray himself as a masculine subject – this journey was his choice, for want of a better term. The two photos visually contrast men’s “optimism” with family members’ sorrow, constituting the migrants as adventurers and expectant breadwinners, and the experience as part of a masculine domain. This leaving process, rather than making victims, acts as a kind of border between Mexicans. It is as some are transformed into braceros while others are left behind. The 1956 Nadel photo (Figure 5.5) shows a Mexican official inspecting a man’s hands. After men were initially chosen and moved on to the next selection round, their hands were scrutinized. Those designated for selection had to have weathered hands – as one former bracero said, officials wanted “men’s hands – callused and hard hands that were used” (qtd. in Cohen, 105). Since many men were not farm laborers, those without hands sufficiently callused would, in the days leading up to the screening, rub their hands vigorously with stones, sticks, and even formaldehyde, often until their hands bled or peeled, to develop calluses and sores (Life Magazine28). They expressed satisfaction at “fool[ing]” the officials (Cohen 99). While we might understand it as a degrading intervention

Figure 5.5 Official scrutinizes aspiring bracero’s hands. Leonard Nadel, 1956. Smithsonian Institution. Permission NMAH 2004.0138.11.39.

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Figure 5.6 Official checks future braceros for indications of physical weakness. Leonard Nadel, 1956. Smithsonian Institution. Permission NMAH 2004.0138.02.28.

– and a few braceros I spoke with did – many took the appraisal of their hands as workers’ hands as confirming their manhood. It was a point of dignity and pride. In another of Nadel’s 1956 photos (Figure 5.6), a Texas official is assessing the musculature of the bracero hopefuls. To even be considered as a bracero, men needed to have recommendation confirming their good character, trustworthiness, and background as a laborer; but men were also sized up for fortitude and physical endurance at points along the way. Braceros considered the inspection upon arrival in the United States the most invasive. Not only were they screened for “epilepsy, … craziness, … chronic alcoholism, psychotic personality, and other problems,” said one of the men I interviewed, a doctor “would examine your eyes, your teeth. … They didn’t want scars – [especially] new scars” (Cohen, 99). Foremen, said another, “opened [our] mouths and looked at [our] teeth – like a horse. We felt degraded” (Cohen, 107). In concluding with “We felt degraded,” this bracero does not merely assert how men felt about these inspections; more importantly, he invokes the collective “we” to rebuke this intrusive scrutiny of their bodies. The collective to which he refers – braceros – was made and remade at each point of the journey around axes of masculinity. In this photo, Nadel has captured men bent over, carefully tending the berry crop. While not visible in this picture, men would at times talk or sing as they worked, sometimes well-known corridos, narrative-form lyrics or poetry that were recited among the popular classes. This was part of a series of shots of braceros at work, some individual migrants, others as a group. Men told me about work as a collective experience. There would be races and bets to see who picked

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the most, as well as support of someone unable to rapidly fill his bag. For him, others would frequently toss some of their pickings into his bag. With no visible photographic relationship to be had, Nadel could configure the men as exploited and the program as abusive; in contrast, they saw themselves against the foremen and absent growers, and stuck together; they were a collective. Many of Nadel’s photos show men in the barriers playing cards, relaxing, cutting hair, washing clothes, cleaning, and sleeping. Apart from the fields, braceros spent much time there. Several braceros learned and practiced their craft as barber or shoe repairer. While American studies scholar Nicole GuidottiHernández reads these photos as a “lack of idleness” (276), they are also a window onto the collective relationships that men built as they worked and leisured. The formation of this collectivity established a border between braceros and non-migrants, Mexicans and Americans. In the taking of the photos, in claiming this idleness, these men presented themselves as dignified and fully masculine workers. I ground my analysis of the bracero photos in Azoulay’s delineation of the photographic relationship, one she anchors in a new formulation of citizenship not mediated by the state. This new form acts as a “framework of partnership and solidarity among those who are governed” irrespective of the boundaries of or legal requirements for state-based citizenship (Azoulay, “Interview”). Her theory of photography, and I quote her at length: approach[es] the photograph (and its meaning) as an unintentional effect of the encounter between camera, photographer, photographed subject, and spectator. None … has the capacity to seal off this effect and determine the photograph’s sole meaning. The civil contract of photography assumes that, at least in principle, the users of photography possess a certain power to suspend the gesture of the sovereign power which seeks to totally dominate the relations between them as governed – governed into citizens and noncitizens, thus making disappear the violation of citizenship. (Azoulay, “Interview”) Moving away from the photograph as something over and done, a moment passed, Azoulay sees it as a “space of [ongoing] political relationships”; the point of departure for the mutual relations between the various “users” of photography, cannot be … “empathy,” “shame,” “pity,” or “compassion.” It must be a covenant for the rehabilitation of their citizenship in the political sphere within which we, spectators and photographed persons, are all ruled. When the photographed persons address the spectator, claiming their citizenship in what I call “the citizenry of photography,” they cease to appear … how[ever] the sovereign regime strives to construct them. (Azoulay, “Interview”) Azoulay’s citizenship of photography is critical for my reading. First, her reliance on lateral connections over the state-based hierarchical divisions calls into

At the border of sight 79 question the presumed distinction between citizen and non-citizen as it helps highlight the state’s (and growers’) ability to conscribe braceros to miserable working and living conditions based on men’s unquestionable non-Americanness. While non-white people were then racially delimited from accessing the privileges of full Americanness, braceros’ actual Mexican citizenship made this racial boundary less porous. Second, her use of citizenship also bespeaks duties and responsibilities. It allocates to US citizen-spectators the grave responsibility for changing conditions of abuse and pain. For her, the camera imagines a citizenship that realigns responsibilities and reworks the power of official and unofficial, but always enforced, borders. In her examples, Azoulay’s theoretical intervention seems to assume a preeminent, if not sole, role for the state in this hierarchization and denial of citizenship rights. Yet braceros were neither asking for nor entitled to citizenship rights; and they didn’t expect them. Rather, they came to work and to return, anticipating or hoping that their labor would earn them enough money to support families and with it, full masculinity. Moreover, the many unofficial and official agents of individual large agribusinesses – not the state – were responsible for how the program played out on the ground; these people established and carried out the daily regimens to which migrants were subject. While the bi-state agreement laid out the terms by which growers were supposed to abide, the guidelines for work and leisure were imposed by their on-site (often Mexican-descended) foremen whose national, racial, ethnic prejudices largely structured the rules they set. Onerous and illegal practices were frequently the focus of negotiation as braceros pressured for better prepared Mexican food and stricter adherence to wage and work stipulations. They also experienced inequity during their trips to town; too often limited to shopping and drinking at Mexican-American-owned stores, restaurants, and bars, they saw prejudice from those whom they felt a connection; Mexican Americans often hid their wives and daughters or prevented braceros from socializing with them. That is, the structures and practices that most ordered migrants’ lives were more visible as local decisions and attributable to foremen and owners of shops and cantinas. The lived version of the border was less of nation-state than of race and non-localness/foreignness. This focus on local, however, did not exempt all states from braceros’ accusations of responsibility; rather, the men directed anger squarely at Mexico, which they saw as responsible for their protection and well-being as citizens. The Mexican Revolution (1910–1917), which overthrew Porfirio Díaz (who had ruled since 1876) and established a new state form, gave birth to a revolutionary rhetoric of its responsibility for the betterment of all citizens (not just the wealthy). And citizens began to hold the state to its word. In 1957, only several months after The Pageant had published the Nadel spread, the Chihuahua daily El herald reported on a bracero-Mexican police clash at the border. Juan Silos, a returning migrant bloodied from a clash, commented that “I don’t know why they talk about discrimination against braceros outside Mexico. … [Here] they [the police] almost kill us.” The accompanying article was even stronger in its elaboration of state betrayal:

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That is, while braceros (and many non-migrating Mexicans) might have hoped for US enforcement of the agreement and definitely held the Mexican state to its claims of citizen protection, overall, local structures of discrimination shaped laborers’ daily experiences, for which (at least many) braceros held an array of local individuals responsible. Yet they were experienced and understood within a larger and seemingly unwavering national divisions. They weren’t equals as early Mexican state rhetoric hinted at, they came to the United States to work. Photos that then urged US citizens to act and shut down the program also communicate braceros’ hopes to realize their own goals.

Conclusion In November 1960, on Thanksgiving, Edward R. Murrow’s documentary Harvest of Shame was broadcast, putting the lives of agricultural workers into full view for the American public. While not about braceros, it showed the conditions under which the country’s domestic farmworkers – largely black and poor white – labored. And it caused an uproar. If you watch the full video, easily accessible online, the language and visual images used to portray these conditions – of back-breaking work, of horrific living conditions, of young children left to entertain themselves without adult supervision – conjured backwardness as well as sympathy for and outrage at the situation of these domestic farm workers, residents a country that saw itself as the epitome of modernity and increasing economic opportunity. Laborers who put food on everyone’s tables had little for themselves. Without massive change, Murrow argued, these men and women would never escape impoverishment and enter our modern world. This video, of poverty and deprivation, would add to the mounting pressure to end the program, which the United States did unilaterally in 1964; in its place, the two countries set up the maquiladora system. Compare the video to a photo shot in May 1943, in which braceros heading home look proudly out the window; one man smiling, they posed for the camera, displaying what is so important for them – the money in their pockets2; they present themselves as they wanted to be seen. While the overwhelming sentiment of Harvest of Shame is resignation, these men appear satisfied; they have money (and partially hidden suitcases) to show for their labor. Especially noticeable in this comparison, Harvest of Shame and the Nadel and Hermanos Mayo photos convey a different perspective onto the people themselves. Murrow’s lens highlights the seclusion of domestic farmworkers’ children and the workers themselves; kids were separated from parents as they worked; and parents worked in isolation from everyone else – Murrow paints a desolate and alienated life. This portrayal is reminiscent of Dorothea Lange’s photos of 1930s farm families and a foreshadower of

At the border of sight 81 a January 31, 1964, Life Magazine spread, immediately after the termination of the program. Life’s focus was on Appalachia as a “lonely valley” of “people without hope”; in the same issue that introduced the Beatles to America, the then targets of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty were shown as the “long … ignored” of “affluent America.” The poor were not only “disease-ridden and unschooled” and lived “in shacks without plumbing or sanitation,” as Life called them, they were, like Murrow’s farmworkers, divided from the rest of America. The poor, both black and white, existed within society but were not of it (“The Valley of Poverty” 54–55). Contrast this to the Hermanos Mayo depiction of braceros as engaged collective and masculine agents. While Life and Harvest of Shame showed the “downtrodden” in the United States largely “accept[ing] their way of life,” these Hermanos Mayo and Nadel photos showed Mexican laborers as both exploited and resilient. These foreigners worked with each other, ate alongside each other, and journeyed together (“The Valley” 56); often they were serious, in others, they were enthused. Despite Nadel’s narrative of exploitation, the men attempted to actively compose themselves as masculine subjects and as a well-integrated and supportive collective. This expanded recognition of braceros’ emotions and attitudes enables us to look beyond those of pain and suffering. And oral histories of former braceros show their feelings were many. As one migrant put it, “the term ‘bracero … is a word of distinction, for me it is a word of great pride. I would like that word to go down in history’” (Cohen, i). José Guadalupe Rodriguez Fonseca told his grandson that the work was “very difficult but … [we] took great pride,” the dignity of the work they did, regardless of whether it was recognized as such. This man, asserting the historical importance of this term, simultaneously commemorated the bracero experience and objected to the flat narrative of victimhood Nadel’s photos sought to convey. Despite confronting and recognizing the systemically unequal relations built into agriculture, migration, and the US-Mexican relationship, bracero migrants refused to see themselves as only victims. Their journeys were part of the struggle to reclaim themselves as legible and fully masculine men, but they also became Mexican citizens (Cohen). What is the takeaway from analyzing these photos and, indeed, all visual material? Yes, they come with a methodological potential to see only the motivations of the photographer, which for Nadel, was the program’s abuse and exploitation. For him, migrants’ understandings of their experiences, their motives and goals, remained outside the frame. For the migrants, as seen in many of the Hermanos Mayo pictures, the program needed to be set against not just prior lives in Mexico, but the many points of interaction along and within the journey, and their return home as changed people. By focusing, as I have here, on the photographic relationship undergirding and embedded in the photos themselves, we can begin to recognize braceros’ actions to portray themselves as full agentive subjects. When read together, we can see the program’s multiple layers and conflicting goals as photos suggest the ways that the photographic relationship opened up the space for men to actively reconfigure themselves. Thus, this space suggests the ways a program fraught with constraining and degrading conditions could have been

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used by the braceros to reposition their futures through making a masculine and collectivist present.

Notes 1 This is a reference to Shawn Michelle Smith’s book, At the Edge of Sight. 2 https://www.gettyimages.com/photos/corbis-historical-mexican-migrants?mediatype= photography&phrase=corbis%20historical,%20mexican%20migrants&sort=mostpopular

Bibliography Azoulay, Ariella. Interview with Ariella Azoulay on her Book the Civil Contract of Photography, 2009. http://rorotoko.com/interview/20090123_azoulay_ariella_book_ civil_contract_photography Becker, Marjorie. Setting the Virgin on Fire: Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán Peasants and the Redemption of the Mexican Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. “Budge at the Border.” Life Magazine. February 15, 1954, 26–30. Cohen, Deborah. Braceros: Migrant Citizen and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. Craib, Raymond R. Cartographic Mexico: A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Gamio, Manuel. Forjando Patria. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2010. Guidotti-Hernández, Nicole. “Bracero Lives and the Lack of Idleness. ‘Free Time’,” Revista Lusófona de Estudos Culturais | Lusophone Journal of Cultural Studies 1, no. 2 (2016): 275–285. Hershfield, Joanne. Imagining la Chica Moderna: Women, Nation, and Visual Culture in Mexico, 1917–1936. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. Joseph, Gilbert M., Anne Rubenstein and Eric Zolov, eds. Fragments of a Golden Age: The Politics of Culture in Mexico Since 1940. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. Kotchemidova, Christina. “Why We Say ‘Cheese’: Producing the Smile in Snapshot Photography,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 22, no. 1 (2005): 2–25. doi:10.1080/0739318042000331853 Langford, Martha. “Migrant Mothers: Richard Harrington’s Indigenous ‘Madonnas,’” History of Photography 40, no. 1 (2016): 28–48. doi:10.1080/03087298.2015.1112 529 Leshem, Noam and Lauren A. Wright. “Reviews of Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before and The Civil Contract of Photography,” Critical Quarterly 51, no. 2 (2009): 113–120. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8705.2009.01868.x Lopez, Rick. Crafting Mexico: Intellectuals, Artisans, and the State after the Revolution. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. “Los braceros en la mirada de los mayo.” https://cuartoscuro.com.mx/revista/los-braceros -en-la-mirada-de-los-mayo/ Loza, Mireya and Bill Johnson González. “Nadel’s Photography.” Diálogo 19, no. 2 (2016): 113–115. doi:10.1353/dlg.2016.0063. McCormick, Gladys. The Logic of Compromise in Mexico: How the Countryside was Key to the Emergence of Authoritarianism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.

At the border of sight 83 Mraz, John. “Los Hermanos Mayo: Photographing the Braceros,” in John Mraz and Jaime Vélez Story, eds. Uprooted: Braceros in the Hermanos Mayo Lens. University of Houston: Arte Público Press, 1996. Mukai, Gary. “Visualizing the Essential: Mexicans in U.S. Agricultural Workforce.” SPICE, June 16. https://spice.fsi.stanford.edu/news/visualizing-essential-mexicans-usagricultural-workforce Murrow, Edward R. Harvest of Shame. Directed by Fred Friendly. CBS Reports. November 25, 1960. https://www.cbsnews.com/video/1960-harvest-of-shame/ Nadel, Leonard. “Two Worlds.” Pageant (1957): 143. Pinney, Christopher. “Introduction,” in Christopher Pinney and Nicolas Peterson, eds. Photography’s Other Histories. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Roberts, John. Photography and its Violations. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Sentilles, Sarah. “How We Should Respond to Photographs of Suffering,” The New Yorker, August 3, 2017. https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/how-we-should-re spond-to-photographs-of-suffering?verso=true Smith, Shawn Michelle. At the Edge of Sight: Photography and the Unseen. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. “The Valley of Poverty.” Life Magazine. January 31, 1964, 54–65. Toffoli, Erica. “Capturing Capitalism’s Work: Competing Photo-Narratives in the Bracero Program,”Radical History Review 132 (2018): 126–143. doi:10.1215/01636545-6942453 Vaughan, Mary Kay. Cultural Politics in Revolution: Teachers, Peasants, and Schools in Mexico, 1930–1940. Tucson: University of Arizona, 1997. Vaughan, Mary Kay and Steven Lewis. The Eagle and the Virgin: Nation and Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 1920–1940. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.

6

Barbed wire A history of cruelty Tabea Linhard

Sometimes very simple things can lead to the most complicated and violent histories: barbed wire is one of such things. This device has not only made (and continues to make) it possible to control very large spaces and the subjects who cross them; its history also is literally entangled with colonialism, warfare, migration, and human rights. As numerous cultural histories of barbed wire show, its depiction across cultures and art forms are myriad.1 This chapter, however, begins with a look at one specific image: a linocut belonging to La comedia humana, a series by Germanborn artist Clément Moreau (Joseph Carl Meffert, 1903–1988) (“An der Grenze,” Figure 6.1).2 The series appeared in several Argentine newspapers between 1940 and 1941. A man’s face fills almost the entire frame; he looks emaciated, if not haunted. A barbed wire fence that signals a border is shown behind him. The face (and not the barbed wire) dominates the image, while the fence looks uneven and tangled. Clearly, more than one has already tried to cross it, regardless of the pain that the barbs tearing through skin and flesh may have caused. While a small rendering of a swastika situates this work in the context of World War II, the image also conjures up the many parts of the world and moments in history where and when barbed wire – and its more virulent cousin, razor wire – is used to prevent subjects from crossing borders. The title of the above-described image is “At the Border,” and its author has called the next image in the series “The Other Side.” Here, a soldier carrying a weapon stands behind the barbed wire fence, evidently guarding the border. Different from the earlier image, now the lines of barbed wire are straight, while in the following image in the series the fence again loses its structure, looking labyrinthine instead. This image is followed by a fourth one, “The Man with the Passport,” showing a character in possession of the prized travel documents that enable him to cross borders. The barbed wire remains visible in the background, except that now it looks more like a wall than a fence. A fifth image, actually entitled “The Barbed Wire,” shows the man from the first image. But now he is holding on to a tangled fence, while a soldier’s hand on the other side appears to be ordering him to move away. This leads up to a sixth image, a rendering that shows how the fugitive’s emotions have changed since he was first pictured at the border (“Ohne Titel,”

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Figure 6.1 Clément Moreau, “An der Grenze”. Reproduced with permission from the Clément Moreau Stiftung (https://clement-moreau.ch).

Figure 6.2).3 Differently from the other images, the fence is now reduced to four parallel lines, and the barbs are much larger than they were on the earlier images. A disembodied hand on the fence’s opposite side takes up roughly one-fourth of the image, as it points to the man’s altered face: he is screaming, his features are grotesque, if not monstrous. Yet in the next image, “The Decision,” the man’s features have returned to the somber look from the first linocut. The barbed wire is still there, but in five, hardly visible straight lines behind the man’s face. The next image reveals what the man’s decision was: to climb the fence, as depicted in the following linocut with, once again, a different use of scale. The barbs, roughly as long as the man’s pinky finger, are now digging through his skin. Finally, as seen in the subsequent image, he manages to climb over the fence, to an idylliclooing other side, with trees and farmhouses. Yet the fugitive’s life on the other side of the border will be anything but bucolic: he has no money, no passport. He is, to cite the title of the last image, “No Longer Human, Stateless.” This image that closes the series shows the same distorted grotesque features that already appeared when the man is pictured grabbing the barbed wire fence (Figure 6.2). The only difference now is that unconcerned and cruel-looking bureaucrats have taken place of barbed wire. Moreau’s depictions of barbed wire alternate between straight and tangled renditions; in some of the linocuts the barbed wire is a fence, in others, a wall or even labyrinth. Yet in all cases this “thing” is more than a “thing”: it is a menace and

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Figure 6.2 Clément Moreau “Ohne Titel”. Reproduced with permission from the Clément Moreau Stiftung (https://clement-moreau.ch).

a weapon that leaves visible and invisible wounds on all those daring to trespass. The process of dehumanization that becomes evident in Moreau’s series shows that barbed wire and statelessness, which is equivalent to his rightlessness, are invariably connected.4 Moreau created the series of 107 linocuts La comedia humana, originally entitled “Night over Germany,” between 1937 and 1938, in the early years of his exile in Argentina. In 1940, the images began appearing in different local publications, including the exile presses Argentinisches Tageblatt and Argentina Libre. Moreau, who called himself a “professional emigrant,” had been a disciple of artist Käthe Kollwitz in Berlin. He was forced to leave Germany in 1933, and so crossed the Swiss border clandestinely, perhaps in ways that did not differ much from what is shown in La comedia humana. In 1935, a Nansen passport allowed him to leave Europe and settle in Argentina. La comedia humana narrates the Nazi terror that Moreau and many of his friends and allies experienced in Germany. In addition to the above-discussed process of dehumanization, the series also includes a narrative based on the biography of Erich Mühsam (1878–1934), a satirist and pacifist Moreau had befriended. Mühsam was arrested and eventually murdered at the Oranienburg concentration camp in 1934. Shortly after his death, Moreau published his rendition of Mühsam’s murder, “Erich Mühsam in memoriam,” in Switzerland.5 The image shows a man hanging in a prison cell – a man who could not have been responsible for his own death because his hands are cuffed behind his back. A similar image (without

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the features that make the man recognizable as Mühsam) appears in La comedia humana, even though Mühsam’s features are now absent. Yet, the fact that the image is entitled “Suicide,” his hands tied behind his back, suggests that Moreau is depicting a murder just like Mühsam’s, a murder that took place in Nazi Germany. However, the geographical ambiguity of the linocut could locate this image in Argentina, or just about anywhere. The series also includes a few images of the murdered man’s widow. She is shown picking up her husband’s ashes from the police (enduring the additional humiliation of having to pay for them). Then a burial takes place in the streets that could be those of Berlin or those of Buenos Aires. When images belonging to the series appeared in Argentinisches Tageblatt in 1941, they included the prescient subtitle, “True account of what life would be for us if tomorrow we had to endure a dictatorship.” As Jessica Zeller observes, the title indicated that “what was happening in Europe could repeat itself under a dictatorship anywhere in the world, even in Argentina” (Zeller 151).6 While Argentina would indeed endure a dictatorship, neither Moreau nor the publishers of Argentinisches Tageblatt had the capacity to predict the future. Yet the series still is both a document of fascist terror and a global warning. Moreover, the linocuts tell a story that reveals that barbed wire is always more than a thing, or that a fence is more than a fence. A similar notion comes across in Lê Thị Diễm Thúy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For, a novel that chronicles the lives of Vietnamese refugees in California. The novel’s narrator at one point recalls the first memory of her father’s face, “framed by the coiling barbed wire of a military camp in South Vietnam.” Later in the text, when a barbed wire fence has reappeared near the main character’s California home, she wonders: “I want to know, why – why there’s always a fence. Why there’s always someone on the outside wanting someone … something on the inside and between them … this … sharp fence” (97). Lê’s imagery serves as a framework for the remainder of this chapter, as her words put forth that barbed wire, the sharp fence that separates outside from the inside, us from them, and territories from bodies, has shaped the history of displacement and border crossing since the late nineteenth century. Moreover, barbed wire also frames and encloses memories. Thus, in order to understand borders and forms of border crossing, it is important to recognize how the use of barbed wire around the world has influenced and continues to influence the lives (and sometimes the deaths) of forcibly displaced individuals and how it has entered the memories of those whose lives it has marked in visible or invisible forms. The examples listed in this chapter are not part of an exhaustive list; instead they are meant to illustrate how the history of barbed wire, cultural and otherwise, is tightly interwoven with the above-mentioned histories of colonialism, warfare, migration, and human rights.

Barbed wire today In late August of 2019, the Spanish Secretary of Interior Fernando Grande Marlaska announced that the “concertinas” (razor wire) that had been placed in 2005 in the border fences surrounding the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla

88 Tabea Linhard would be removed. Ideally, by November of 2020 the sole borders of the European Union on African soil would then be safer, without the razor wire. The decision was made based on reports that the sharp razors simply did not dissuade migrants from attempting to cross the border fences and really did not do much more than causing severe injuries. Yet even removing the razor wire from the border fences will not necessarily improve conditions for migrants.7 The Migrant Holding Centers (Centros de Estancia Temporal or CETIs) that the Spanish Ministry of Labor, Migration and Social Services manages in Ceuta and Melilla continue to be overcrowded.8 Moreover, “express deportations” (meaning that migrants will be sent back to Morocco without due processing Spain) will not cease to be a problem in the near future.9 Even if the razor wires may eventually be a thing of the past in Ceuta and Melilla, we are witnessing the opposite phenomenon elsewhere. While about a dozen fortified border fences stood when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, more than 70 exist now around the world (Friedman; Taylor). The United States is, of course, no exception: in the fall of 2018, American troops received orders to install concertina wire along the border, expecting a so-called caravan of Central American migrants still miles away. Heated debates about the symbolism of fortifying the border ensued, ranging from praises of the fence’s apparent beauty to the nightmarish evocation of concentration camps. As Rebecca Onion wrote in Slate that fall, “[T]he histories of barbed wire and concertina wire are undeniably connected to the history of the American West, westward expansion, and the full force of its violence and cruelty.” Or, as Onion puts it, “the dream of the West – to own land and a lot of it; to be sure that nothing happens on that land that you cannot control; to inflict violence on those who threaten the dream” – was made possible with the use of barbed wire. Barbed wire fences, razor wire fences, and other more invisible fences that keep bodies in control and in pain have only become more and not less numerous across the world. An example of a more modern and invisible fence here would be the use of ankle monitors, devices that make it possible for some migrants to avoid detention centers, but that also are part of problematic surveillance practices. To make matters worse, those wearing monitors can become financially responsible for the very expensive devices used to control their movements (Gómez Cervantes, Menjívar and Staples). The fact that, not unlike barbed wire, wearing ankle monitors leads to pain and injury should not be disregarded.

How barbed wire enters history Barbed wire, “twisted wires armed with barbs or sharp points – called also barbwire” according to Merriam Webster is a “thing” that together with colonial enterprises and bureaucracies across the world has been digging into soil and skin, and ensuring that there always is (always will be) an inside and outside. While the use of razor wire dates back to the trenches of World War I, the history of barbed wire is a bit longer, originating in the late nineteenth century, when several patterns

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for barbed wire were registered in Europe and the United States. From then on, a history of enclosure, transgression, and pain unravels. Reviel Netz provides a sobering account of this history in Barbed Wire: An Ecology of Modernity. Netz begins his study pointing out that space enters history “through the prevention of motion.” Originally invented to prevent the movement of animals (of cows) and not of people, “barbed wire’s success as a tool of control,” writes Alan Krell, author of The Devil’s Rope. A Cultural History of Barbed Wire, “was always based on its ability to effect pain” (Krell 35). The earliest to endure this pain were cattle in the American plains. Even back then, this thing’s “intimate relationship with the body” was an obvious one: the barbed wire hurt animals and also their owners (if not physically, at least economically), which then quickly led to new business ventures: barbed wire liniments and antiseptics (Krell 36; 37). The long history of barbed wire in the American West never was solely about owning animals; it also was, as mentioned earlier, about owning land, and, as Onion writes, “a lot of it.” This aspect connects the usage of barbed wire to the fates of native communities residing in land – about to become privately owned, enclosed, and fenced in – and their, to use Hannah Arendt’s expression, “right to have rights.” While Arendt’s phrase is commonly invoked in contemporary discussions about forced displacement, it also resonates in relation to this particular history of violence. Indigenous people of the United States were granted citizenship in 1924, so their historical relationship with rights and rightlessness differs from the subjects Arendt discusses, first in her 1949 essay “The Rights of Man: What Are They,” (a piece published shortly after the adoption of the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” in 1948) and later in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Arendt addresses what happens when members of a specific community, belonging to a particular social group, are deprived of rights they once held.10 They are deprived, not of the right to freedom, but of the right to action: not of the right to think whatever they please, but of the right to opinion. … We become aware of the existence of a right to have rights (and that means to live in a framework where one is judged by one’s actions and opinions) and a right to belong to some kind of organized community, only when millions of people emerge who had lost and could not regain these rights because of the new global political situation. (177) Clearly, the indigenous communities in the United States could not lose the “right to have rights,” once barbed wire entered their lives and the spaces they inhabited, given that they had never had this right in the first place. Yet barbed wire has also shaped this specific history of rightlessness. The cover of “New Frontiers,” a comic published by the United States Steel Corporation in 1958, illustrates this (Krell 67). The cover depicts a “blond-haired, handsome ‘Marlboro cowboy’ erecting a barbed wire fence with the aid of a smiling boy squatting nearby” (Krell 44). Yet the image that most forcefully reveals this history of cruelty in the American

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West is one of the smaller pictures shown on the same cover, underneath the rendering of the cowboy. The words “Westward expansion” appear written on the middle image, and a stereotypical rendering of a Native American man on a horse and shooting an arrow is accompanied by the words, “See how barbed wire helped tame the West” (Krell 67). Thus, in addition to locating “barbed wire firmly within a discourse of capitalist democracy,” this publication also reveals the interconnected nature of barbed wire and rightlessness (Krell 67). In addition to its multiple uses during the westward expansion in the United States, barbed wire also quickly became a tool that facilitated colonization as well as colonial warfare. As Netz argues, barbed wire “opened the way for a new kind of control over colonial space” (59). Netz’s study poignantly shows that the history of barbed wire indeed is part of a history of violence. There is no need to put barbed wire in the way of civilians: put a sign saying No Trespassing, and ninety-nine out of a hundred will stop. But then again, sometimes they do not stop, and violence must be administered. The problem is exacerbated when fundamental loyalty is in question – when people do not agree with the No Trespassing signs. Suppose you conquer a foreign people, or suppose some of your subjects are citizens of a nations with which you are at war; how would you make them respect your rules? Violence must be used, then, on a large scale. An instrument for the deployment of violence on a massive scale would be very useful for this purpose, and this is how barbed wire enters political history – as a continuation of the history of war. (128) In 1899, barbed wire met human skin and human pain during the Anglo-Boer Wars in South Africa, when it was used in conjunctions with “blockhouses” (small, isolated garrisons), which would later become “blocaos” in the Spanish Protectorate in Northern Morocco. El Bloaco also happens to be the title of José Díaz Fernández 1928 novel about the Rif War. This “novel of the Moroccan War,” as the book’s subtitle indicates, displays “bitterness and rage towards his imperialistic, colonizing fatherland.” Díaz Fernández accomplishes this in a subtle manner “by skillfully embedding ideology within the novelistic design” (Schneider 408). While the blockhouses or “blocaos” were mobile structures, barbed wire was what made them an effective weapon in this particular colonial war. In this context, it is worth mentioning another weapon that originated during the Anglo-Boer Wars: the concentration camp. Concentrating, debilitating, and killing people in an enclosed space, oftentimes with the help of widely available and affordable coils of barbed wire, originated during this nineteenth-century conflict. Mainly women and children were the ones taken to camps, where they would be met with starvation, dehydration, and disease. Thus, the histories of barbed wire and of the concentration camp (a term used for the first time in 1901) and the internment camp, prisoner camp, the extermination camp, and even the refugee camp are tightly interwoven with one another. While it is true, as Lindsey

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Stonebridge writes, that “a death camp is not a refugee camp, nor is interning ‘undesirable aliens’ a necessary prelude to genocide,” she admits that “that turned out to be exactly the case with Gurs” (Stonebridge 47). Stonebridge here refers to the camp in Southwestern France, where Hannah Arendt had “the opportunity to spend some time,” in 1940 (Arendt, “Refugees” xx). Moreover, these different camps could not have existed without barbed wire, and so the history of this very simple thing is inextricably connected to the cruel histories of deportations, internment, and genocide across the world. In 1918, German physician Adolf Lukas Vischer coined the term “Stacheldrahtkrankheit” (“Barbed Wire Disease”) in order to name the mental health issues that prisoners of war had to endure in a concentration camp in the UK during World War I. Vischer used the term to describe “a set of neurotic symptoms which he observed among long-term prisoners of war and which, in effect, undermined their sense of masculine self-worth and future potential as fathers, citizens and soldiers” (Stibbe 58). Vischer’s gendered understanding of “Barbed Wire Disease” surely is a product of his time and should not distract from his reference to citizenship here. The use of barbed wire to stop subjects from moving across borders, or to confine them in a camp where all their potentials will be undermined, scrapes the very core citizenship, the very core of the “right to have rights.” Now, while barbed wire has become such a common item across the globe, Netz’s book shows how violent the history of this tool, this “sharp fence,” actually is. Clearly, no all uses of barbed wire are the same. Appearances of barbed wire in the early twentieth century, during World War II, and in today’s fortified borders in Ceuta and Melilla, the US-Mexico Borderlands, and in other places where the flows of migration have reached, should be understood within their respective contexts. I am also not proposing a counterfactual version of history along the lines of: without barbed wire, there would be colonialism, no warfare, no pain and loss, no Barbed Wire Disease, no difference between human and citizen. Or, to go back to Moreau’s images, it is not the sheer object that has rendered the fugitive in La comedia humana stateless and therefore “no longer human,” it is the ways in which this object has been put to use – and the Nazi Genocide may be the most evident example of this. In all likelihood, in addition to contemporary border fences across the world, the death camps and ghetto walls in Eastern Europe may come to mind when one considers how barbed wire has been used at a massive scale to prevent people from moving or, to use Lê’s terms again, to create an outside and an inside. Yet these camps were not the first ones where barbed wire was used; indeed, the history of barbed wire also connects these camps’ histories of pain, violence, and cruelty in continental Europe to related histories elsewhere in the world. Arendt has famously argued that the violence of World War II is intrinsically related to the violence of colonialism. A year before Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism, Aimé Césaire had already made these connections clear, arguing that Hitler “applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved for the Arabs of Algeria, the ‘coolies’ of India, and the blacks of

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Africa” (3). In recent years, more nuanced implications of these historical connections, also called the “boomerang effect” or “boomerang thesis,” have received renewed critical attention – and so a much more complex history of World War II (and of the uses of barbed wire during this conflict) unravels.11 The establishment of enclosed camps for detained individuals was by no means limited to Eastern Europe during World War II: one can think of the camps on French beaches where Spanish refugees were confined after the defeat of the Republic in 1939 – the above-mentioned camp in Gurs was one of these locations. These camps were later repurposed for all those who, just like Hannah Arendt and many others, became “undesirable” in occupied France. For many Spanish Republicans who fled North (to France) and South (to Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco), the first years of exile also meant confinement in a prison camp. Silvia Mistral, author of Exodus: Diary of a Spanish Refugee, recalls her experience in the French camps: “Like beasts, behind barbed wire, the Spanish, without blankets, without food, without sun: injured, dying, are banished to the desert” (53). While Mistral may not have been as concerned about masculinity as Dr. Vischer was, she also suffered a version of “Barbed Wire Disease.” Differently from the camps built for German prisoners of war in the United Kingdom that Vischer observed before he coined the term “Stacheldratkrankheit,” the concentration camps built in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War and repurposed World War II were constructed for both men and women, and on European and also African soil. This is perhaps best exemplified in what may be the most famous movie (about refugees) of all times: Michael Curtiz classic Casablanca (1942). References to concentration camps are numerous in the film, yet when Major Strasser (Conrad Veidt) threatens Victor Lazlo (Paul Hendreid) with incarceration in a concentration camp, he is not referring to one located in Europe but one, “right here,” in Casablanca. And such camps were numerous in the Maghreb.12 One of the many imprisoned individuals in the camps in North Africa was writer Max Aub, who was sent to Djelfa (Algeria). Aub may be, at least in the Hispanophone world, the most famous prisoner in North Africa, partially due to his Djelfa Diary, the collection of poems he wrote in Algeria and later published in Mexico. And barbed wire is everywhere in his text, constantly limiting Aub’s vision of the Algerian landscape. The poem “As the Saying Goes” begins with the verses “Against hunger, barbed wire/night and day” (47). The sound of the word “alambrada” (barbed wire) echoes “hambre” (hunger). As pervasive as hunger, barbed wire is wherever the poet turns his gaze, as shown in another poem “Djelfa”: “The black barbed wire, in soft grays, cuts through the landscape toward the Levant” (50). Just like the Algerian landscape is delimited by actual barbed wire, the Spanish landscape that Aub simultaneously misses and rejects is constrained by an invisible, but perhaps even more virulent and damaging, barbed wire.

How barbed wire remains in history This landscape, framed and torn apart by barbed wire, is not the same one that migrants in the twenty-first century see as they approach Ceuta and Melilla – in

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addition to the fact that the earlier two texts are about Algeria and not Morocco. Moreover, differently from the works that depict the lived experience in prison camps in the Maghreb during World War II, more recent texts about border crossings do not focus so much on the ways in which barbed wire frames the landscapes, but rather on the moments when the barbed wire or the razors cut through skin. Invented to stop the movement of animals, barbed wire now obstructs the movement of people, as it inflicts unbearable pain on all those who dare to cross borders clandestinely, just like the fugitive in Moreau’s linocuts. But it will not stop their movement. There may always be a fence, but there will also always be people crossing the fence. Marie N’Diaye’s novel Three Strong Women comes to mind here. The third strong woman in N’Diaye’s book is Khady Demba, a young widow from an unnamed African nation, possibly Senegal, who embarks on an uncertain journey to Europe. After numerous hardships, she reaches the border fences in Morocco (even though actual geographical locations are never mentioned in the novel). The book ends as Khady climbs up a makeshift ladder in order to cross a border fence. She tried to go higher, remembering that a boy had told her you must never, never stop climbing until you’ve reached the top, but the barbed wire was tearing the skin of her hands and feet and she could not hear herself screaming and feel blood running along her shoulders and down her arms. A very similar description appears in Partir para contar, a memoir of migration and border crossing that Mahmoud Traoré coauthored with Bruno Le Dantec. Traoré attempted several times to cross the fence in Melilla. When he finally succeeds in Ceuta, he takes a severe injury to his foot with him: as the sharp fence cuts through skin and muscle, at first he barely feels the pain. Yet the memory of the wound will be part of the invisible luggage that Traoré takes with him to Europe: “I still remember the sound of clothes torn apart in the fences” (203). Needless to say, barbed wire, or razor wire, tend to cut through far more than clothes. As mentioned earlier, barbed wire and razor wire fences appear in fortified borders, yet they also do in prisons and certain institutions for the mentally ill, the “mental asylum.” Given the origin of the term, the mental asylum was to offer a place without the “right of seizure,” a place where one could be safe from violence. In this case, those in need of protection were the mentally ill, or at least perceived to be mentally ill. And here, another history of injustice, abuse, and pain and of an inside and outside, and of rightlessness becomes evident. Ranjana Khanna briefly refers to this history in her 2006 essay “Asylum.” That people in asylums have often been unjustly treated and incarcerated seems entirely incontrovertible, and that this has been done in a way that has benefited the state in the name of security of the insane or of the population at large is clear. Whether women in mental asylums, colonial asylums, or asylums such as the one in Canton Insane Asylum for American Indians, South

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Asylum, as Khanna reminds us in her essay, is as much about time as it is about space, and so she writes: “The space of asylum suggests the rights of institutions over living bodies, rather than the rights of citizens emerging into different spaces” (477). The fact that today the very notion of asylum is under siege, as it was during World War II, goes hand in hand with the reappearance of barbed wire and razor wire scaring landscapes and scaring bodies. Stated differently, our recent history of borders and border crossings, of refuge and of asylum, also is the history of barbed wire, of this “terrible device” and its equally terrible cousins, ranging from razor wire to ankle monitors. The history of barbed wire appears written alongside the history of “the right to have rights” from the late nineteenth century to the present. Yet while there always may be fence, its existence has been challenged, its meaning questioned, its role repurposed: almost as quickly as concertina wire was set up at the border between the United States and Mexico, segments vanished and reappeared again for sale Tijuana (Agren). A very different approach to challenging and repurposing barbed wire is “Impenetrable,” an installation by Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum (whose work also is featured alongside Khanna’s “Asylum”).13 This “array of precisely suspended lengths of barbed wire” invites viewers to consider how the constant presence of a sharp fence affects our relation with an inside and an outside. Hatoum’s piece conjures up bodies in motion and in pain: barbed wire and its history of cruelty.

Notes 1 See Bennett and Abbott (2017), Netz (2010), Liu (2009), and Krell (2002). Patrick Brantlinger’s Barbed Wire: Capitalism and the Enclosure of the Commons (2017) moves into a slightly different direction. Brantlinger uses barbed wire as a metaphor for capitalist modernization. His book is about “capitalism and the enclosure or privatization of what has been communally owned land and other forms of ‘the commons’” (ix). 2 Clément Moreau, “An der Grenze” (88). The entire series, as well as Moreau’s other works, can be viewed at https://clement-moreau.ch/werk/ 3 Clément Moreau, Ohne Titel (93). 4 I am referring here to Hannah Arendt’s understanding of rights and rightlessness, to be discussed in further detail later in this essay. As Lindsey Stonebridge writes, in reference to Arendt’s 1941 essay, “Active Patience,” “to be left to the arbitrary decisions of other nations was to be left, precisely, nowhere: to be stateless was to be rightless” (Stonebridge 184). 5 “Erich Mühsam zum Gedächtnis,” Der Öffenliche Dienst, August 10, 1934, No. 12. 6 Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 7 The 2017 film Les Sauteurs depicts the lives of migrants living in Mount Gourougou, Melilla. It becomes clear that razor wire fences hardly are the sole weapons causing migrants’ fear – and sometimes their deaths. 8 See the report “Spain: Assessing Health System Capacity to Manage Sudden Large Influxes of Migrants.”

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9 Ambassador Tomáš Boček, Special Representative of the Secretary General on migration and refugees, presented a report to the Council of Europe in March 2018. https:// rm.coe.int/09000016808d2c31 10 I am paraphrasing the contemporary definition of “Refugee” adopted after the 1951 Refugee Convention in Geneva: “A refugee has a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group” (my emphasis). https://www.unrefugees.org/refugee-facts/what-is-a-refu gee/ 11 See Stone (2001) and Rothberg (2009). In his reading of Hannah Arendt and Aimé Césaire, Michael Rothberg points out that “colonial violence foreshadows totalitarianism at the same time that totalitarianism casts a shadow backward on the colonial archive” (64). 12 For more information on the Holocaust in North Africa, see Boum and Stein (2019). 13 Hatoum’s work can be seen at https://www.guggenheim.org/blogs/checklist/installing -mona-hatoums-impenetrable

Works cited Agren, David. “America Pays for the Wall: Thieves Mock Trump by Stealing Border Razor Wire.” The Guardian, 20 March 2019. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966. Arendt, Hannah. “We Refugees.” Altogether Elsewhere. Writers on Exile. Ed. Marc Robinson. Boston: Faber & Faber, 1996, 111–19. Aub, Max. Diario de Djelfa. Valencia: Edicions de la Guerra & Café Malvarrosa, 1988. Bennett, Lyn Ellen and Scott H. Abbott. The Perfect Fence: Untangling the Meanings of Barbed Wire. College Station: Texas University Press, 2017. Bogart, Humphrey, Ingrid Bergman and Peter Lorre. “Casablanca (DVD).” United States Home Video, 1942. Boum, Aomar and Sarah Abrebaya Stein. The Holocaust and North Africa. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019. Brantlinger, Patrick. Barbed Wire: Capitalism and the Enclosure of the Commons London: Routledge, 2017. Cervantes, Gómez, Andrea Cecilia Menjivar and William G. Staples. “‘Humane’” Immigration Enforcement and Latina Immigrants in the Detention Complex.” Feminist Criminology 12, no. 3 (2017): 269–92. Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press, Aakar Books, 2018. Friedman, Uri. “A World of Walls. Donald Trump’s Proposal for the U.S.-Mexico Border Isn’t Outdated. It’s a Sign of the Times.” The Atlantic, 19 May 2016. Khanna, Ranjana. “Asylum.” Texas International Law Journal 41, no. 3 (2006): 471–90. Krell, Alan. The Devil’s Rope: A Cultural History of Barbed Wire. London: Reaktion, 2002. Lê Thị Diễm Thúy. The Gangster We Are All Looking for. New York: Knopf, 2003. Liu, Joanne S. The Barbed Wire: The Fence That Changed the West. Missoula: Mountain Press Pub Co., 2009. Moreau, Clément La comedia humana/Nacht über Deutschland (1937/1938) 107 Linolschnitte auf Japanpapier (Gampi) Erstveröffentlichung im “Argentinischen Tageblatt und ARGENTINA LIBRE, 1941. N’Diaye, Marie. Three Strong Women. New York: Vintage Books, 2013.

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Netz. Barbed Wire: an Ecology of Modernity. Middleton: Wesleyan University Press, 2010. Onion, Rebecca. “That Beautiful Barbed Wire. The Concertina Wire Trump Loves at the Border Has a Long, Troubling Legacy in the West.” Slate, 6 November 2018. Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory. Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Schneider, Marshall J. “Toward a New Vanguard: Ideology and Novelistic Form in José Díaz Fernández’s El blocao.” Hispania 77, no. 3 (1994): 406–15. “Spain: Assessing Health System Capacity to Manage Sudden Large Influxes of Migrants.”Joint Report of the Ministry of Health, Social Services and Equality of Spain, the Institute of Social Development and Peace of the University of Alicante, the University of Valencia and the WHO Regional Office for Europe, 2018. http://www .euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/373216/spain-report-eng.pdf?ua=1&ua=1 Stibbe, Mattew. “The German Empire’s Response: From Retaliation to the Painful Realities of Defeat.” German Minorities During the First World War: A Global Comparative Perspective. Ed. Panikos Panayi. New York: Routledge, 2016. Stone, Dan “Defending the Plural: Hannah Arendt and Genocide Studies.” New Formations 71 (2001): 46–57. Stonebridge, Lindsey. Placeless People: Writings, Rights, and Refugees. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Taylor, Alan. “Built to Separate: Border Barriers Around the World.” The Atlantic, 15 January 2019. Traoré, Mahmud and Bruno Le Dantec. Partir para contar: un clandestino africano rumbo a Europa. Barcelona: Pepitas de calabaza, 2014. Vischer, Adolf Lukas. “Die Stacheldraht-Krankheit, Beiträge zur Psychologie des Kriegsgefangenen.” Allegemeine Schweizerische Militärzeitung 67 (1921): 118–125. Zeller, Jessica. “Un ilustrador humanista y transcultural: el caso de Clément Moreau.” Iberoamericana 9, no. 33 (2009): 139–56.

Part III

Gender, art, memory, and the migrant

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Mobile reorientations Trans-agency and the queering of the Italian politics of migrant reception in Henrique Goldman’s Princesa Elena Dalla Torre

“Do refugees with different sexual orientation or gender identities have the right to a specific space that preserve their privacy and defend them from persecution and bullying?”1 With this question, LGBTQI activist Amani Zreba posits the necessity for a discrete space that shelters refugees and asylum seekers based on the specificity of their sexual and gender identity. Zreba, who sought refugee status in Italy due to sexual persecutions in Lybia, has been active in reclaiming and creating alternative spaces for queer refugees and migrants. It has been almost 40 years since the Convention Directive for the Status of Refugees deemed sexuality a fundamental aspect of an individual worth international protection. Since 2011, gender identity has become ground for protection, and in 2013 the Court of Justice of the European Union declared that sexual minority members belong to a particular social group for purposes of asylum. Despite these interventions, most queer petitions in the European Union are not captured, argues Johannes Lukas Gartner in his 2015 “In-credibly Queer: Sexuality-based Asylum in the EU.” According to Gartner, many queer asylum seekers become invisible, which legitimizes State omission while calling into question the hetero-centricity of human rights standards. While little research exists on queer refugees and migrants in Europe, the sexuality of migration has recently emerged as a compelling area of debate urging scholars and activists to take a stance and reeducate people against the hetero-centric frame of humanitarian intervention. Sociologists, such as Nicola Mai, also warn us about the fact that “gender and sexuality have increasingly become humanitarian repertoires through which racialized barriers to mobility are inscribed on migrants” (Mai vii). In Mobile Orientations (2018), Mai coins the term “sexual humanitarianism” to refer to “the global emergence of a neo-abolistionist epistemology that legitimizes forms of control and protection of social groups defined as vulnerable in relation to their sexual orientation and behavior” (Mai vii). Sexual humanitarianism allows governments, NGOs, and media to play the protective heroes, while “neglect[ing] the complexity of the libidinal, socioeconomic, and intersubjective dynamics” (Mai 3) of migrants, and especially the group of migrant sex workers. Mai also criticizes the way in which sexual humanitarianism functions in cinematic representation where a wave of “new global

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sentimentality” contributes to the erasure of migrants’ agency and opportunity for self-representation (Mai 4). A different direction was taken by Brazilian director Henrique Goldman, who in 2001 adapted to screen, with the title of Princesa, the testimony of Fernanda Farias de Albuquerque, an Afro-Brazilian transgender sex worker. The testimony – transcribed and published in 1995 by Maurizio Jannelli – recaptures Fernanda’s youth years in Brazil when she first identified as transvestite. It follows her in the early 1980s to São Paulo, where she prostituted as a transsexual taking hormones and getting breast implants. In those years of dictatorship, explains sociologist Julieta Vartabedian, Brazil “declared travestis as enemies of ‘Brazilian family morals’,” starting “an era of great persecution and violence against those who embodie[d] a more feminine appearance” (Vartabdian 5). In order to flee state persecution and the shame experienced within the family, Fernanda left Brazil to be a sex worker first in Madrid and then in Milan. She dreamed of finding in Europe a place of fortune and freedom, a dream that soon turned into a nightmare of heroin addiction, disease, and prison. When Jannelli met Fernanda in jail, she had been sentenced for attempted homicide to six years of prison. After leaving jail, she worked briefly for an editorial and she then returned to the street. Expelled from Italy, she went back to Brazil where she took her life. In his screen adaptation Goldman made a few changes to the original testimony, avoiding the tragic epilogue, and distancing himself from the sexual humanitarian frame of some migrant cinema. Instead, he focused on the complexity of Fernanda’s borderscape and the border struggles that she experienced at the intersection of sex work, gender, racial, and migrant identity. He also foregrounded Fernanda’s agency in moving within the constraints that neoliberalism put upon her body and dreams. In this chapter, I claim that while prefiguring current Italian and European politics of queer migrant reception, the movie also stresses migrant agency and the many different and productive struggles that the border enables. After providing a brief overview of queer asylum procedures in the European Union, I analyze the ways in which the director questions the hetero-centric frames of Italian nationals (police, family, clients) by positing Fernanda’s agency vis-à-vis hetero-centricity. Building on the notions of mobile orientation, differential inclusion, and migrant governance that Nicola Mai and Sandro Mezzadra theorize in their work, I link Fernanda’s struggles for agency to forms of queer migrant self-organizing at the border. The first comprehensive study on queer asylum policies and realities in the European Union came out in Denmark in 2011. Two other major reports have been drafted: Fleeing Homophobia in 2013 and the European Agency for Fundamental Rights Report in 2017. These reports document the conditions of persecution under which certain LGBTQI individuals seek asylum as well as the regulations under which these individuals are granted asylum in European countries. According to Gartner, “over 175.000 queer individuals are estimated to live under persecutory environments” in the forms of “honour killings campaigns, blackmail, corrective rape” (Gartner, 2). ORAM (Organization for Refuge, Asylum and Migration) “estimates that fewer than 2500 queer refugees a year are accorded

Mobile reorientations 101 protection” (Gartner 4), yet statistics are not properly maintained neither by the United Nations nor by the European Union. The process of granting asylum is fraught with inconsistencies, problematic screening practices, and a general lack of understanding that has made individuals more vulnerable. Questions of credibility and stereotyping dominate the discussion, denounces Gartner: queer asylum seekers need “to prove sexuality” by subjecting themselves to sexual arousal tests; or they may be subjected to interrogations that reduce queer identities to anatomy and genitality; or they are asked – cases in the UK – to submit video evidence of intimate contact with individuals of the same sex. The European Union courts require refugees to play a sort of “hide and seek,” offering protection to the individuals who supposedly meet clichés or forcing them to a compliant behavior. The petitioners “more worthy of protection” are the ones “who correspond to essentialist, Western and hetero-normative stereotypes of queer individuals” (Gartner 7). Refugees end up finding in the EU courts the same persecutions they flee, but in the form of procedures that make them the subjects of pharmacopornographic capitalism, and the objects of its “potential gaudendi,” to use Paul B. Preciado’s terminology. In Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (2008), Preciado qualifies of pharmacopornographic the postindustrial, global and mediatic regime that regulates bodies and movements of bodies via “processes of biomolecular (pharmaco) and semio-technical (pornographic) government of sexual subjectivity” (Preciado 34). Expanding on Agamben’s “naked life,” on Foucault’s “biopower” and Haraway’s “techno-bio-power,” Preciado reconfigures as corpus pornographic any subject or body deprived of the right to citizenship and the right to work such as that of the migrant, the deported, the colonized, the sex worker (Preciado 50). Preciado’s notion of the pharmacopornographic can be useful to read both the condition of the queer asylum seeker and the migrant sex worker vis-à-vis the hetero-centric screening for sexual proof. The film Princesa came out in 2001, before the Bossi-Fini law (194/2002) introduced fingerprinting and stricter screening procedures. Unsurprisingly, screening practices also punctuate the film Princesa, hinting at the ways in which the body of the queer migrant may be both exposed for credibility and made to comply at times. Since the first sequences, Fernanda (Ingrid de Souza) is looked upon by train passengers for her “strangely” feminine looks. Later, when retained at the police station, she is asked to show her breasts and perform oral sex on the police agent in exchange for being released. Half-way through the movie, Fernanda is again subjected to the scrutinizing gaze of an Italian woman who silently wants to probe Fernand’s gender. Screening practices do not cease even within the group of sex workers that Fernanda joins. Karin (Lulu Pecorari), her protector, a transgender woman herself, and Charlo (Biba Lerhue), a Brazilian transvestite, both keep Fernanda on check and suggest to her what facilitates sex work. Charlo, for instance, tells her that “[her] tropical dick” is highly marketable to Italian clients. Both Karin and Charlo take care of Fernanda, and Karin embodies, to some extent, the figure of the “maes/madrinhas,” who see themselves as the

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agents of sex work in the Brazilian sex work community in Europe. Like a mae/ madrinha, Karin also provides a home for Fernanda. It is worth mentioning that when the film came out, Silvio Berlusconi was then the prime minister of Italy, and he was later incriminated in a sex gate scandal involving prostitution. During his mandates, years of public debate ensued over the regulation of sex work, an ambiguous terrain of legislation in Italy.2 Between the late 1990s and the early 2000s, several provisions were made to the penal code in order to eradicate sex trafficking and to protect the Italian family. These provisions had the unfortunate consequence to conflate sex work and trafficking, which caused in turn the protest of the Italian Committee of Sex Workers and NGOs. In the movie, the world of sex workers and the Italian family are contiguous yet separate spaces that Fernanda navigates, especially after meeting Gianni (Cesare Bocci), an Italian man recently separated from his wife. Unlike other clients, Gianni wants to know Fernanda as a person, and not merely as commodity, and ends up falling in love with her. After a few encounters, Fernanda and Gianni develop a relationship, which leads her to think that she has finally met the man of her dreams. Fernanda leaves Karin, who had initially offered her “home,” and goes on to live with Gianni. Determined to build a life with him and to undergo surgical reassignment, she starts hormonal treatment under the supervision of a psychiatrist. The movie section portraying Fernanda’s transition into Gianni’s life is particularly significant. The director amplifies – via cinematic techniques – the hetero-centric and sentimental frame of Fernanda’s new life. For instance, during a visit with the gynecologist, a sequence of grotesque images depicts Fernanda, performing the chores of a desperate and bored housewife. As the visual repertoire of domesticity unfolds before the viewers, the psychiatrist – in voice-over – interrogates Fernanda about her masturbatory practices and her sexual feelings. Although the psychiatrist’s questions may seem to mimic the invasive questionnaires of authorities with queer migrants, Fernanda’s answers and the shots tell us a different story. By superimposing Fernanda’s answers about her feelings over the images of domestic chores, the director mocks the way Fernanda is expected to comply with the housewife role and with a heterocentric, let alone oppressive, way of life. Fernanda ends up feeling more confined and estranged than liberated – “I feel strange,” she notes. To complicate matters, Gianni’s wife (Alessandra Acciai) comes back to visit Fernanda when she is alone in the new apartment she now shares with Gianni. The viewers soon learn that Gianni’s wife is back only to announce that she is pregnant and to beg Fernanda to let Gianni go in the name of the child to be born. The wife’s return marks the triumph of biological and social reproduction of the Italian family over a potential for social transformation, which Fernanda embodies. However, it is evident that the director is not complicit with the hetero-centric imperative. By letting us feel the constraints put upon Fernanda’s body and sense of self – her estrangement visà-vis the Italian family and the domestic space – the director critically engages the regime of hetero-centric compliance to which queer migrants – and here transgender migrants – are subjected.

Mobile reorientations 103 Although Gianni refuses to let go of Fernanda, she eventually decides to leave him and goes back to her family of sex workers and to Karin’s home. In a way, Fernanda’s journey represents that of many Brazilian sex workers – travesties, transgender, and cisgender – whose search for normality informs their choice of Europe for sex work. As Vartabedian and Piscitelli point out, Brazilian sex work in Europe is sustained through a network of cross-border activities and practices such as receiving money for travel and accommodation, and sending money to families of origin that help sex workers gain a certain level of respect (Vartabedian 198; Piscitelli 6). Fernanda’s choice has a somewhat similar value. While it signals the failure of the Italian family and of capitalism in general in giving her the promised freedom, it stresses nonetheless Fernanda’s agency or rather “agencing decision” – to use Nicola Mai’s term. In Mobile Orientations, Mai explores the complicity between sexual humanitarianism and neoliberalism; he also highlights, via the method of auto-ethnographies, how sex migrant workers choose sex work to circumvent forms of exploitation and other constraints. Mai frames agency “as the capacity to act within … the contradictory constraints and opportunities for subjectivation engendered by the globalization of neoliberal policies and politics” (Mai 10). This capacity, which reflects migrants’ priorities and needs, is what Mai, drawing from Sara Ahmed, calls “mobile orientation.” Fernanda’s final choice to join the family of street workers may be read as a form of mobile orientation. In Goldman’s depiction, Fernanda reorients her life, away from the traditional Italian family who failed her, in order to reroute and reroot herself into a new community. The film closes on a scene where Fernanda sits on a client’s car, looking out the window, letting the night breeze blow her hair as the sound of Italian bossanova cuddles her. While the bossanova is reminiscent of Fernanda’s Brazilian roots, the choice of Italian lyrics signifies the complexity and the struggle of Fernanda’s self-translation within Italian culture and society. It also signifies her transition as a woman from an enclosed life of housework labor to that of street sex work, in other words from solid to liquid capitalism. Rerouting and relocation have been a central focus in recent migration scholarship and activism (Ahmed, Fassin, Nossem, Fellner) that brought attention to the ways migrants and citizens have come together to form coalitional spaces and reconceive experiences of home. Relocation has also become important in the public response to reception of queer migrants in Italy. When thought through Mai’s “mobile orientation,” “relocation” may be reconsidered also in terms of “reorientation,” especially when it comes to queer migrations. According to the 2017 EU Report on queer asylum seekers, between 2012 and 2017 Italy had 80 requests of LGBTQI seekers. As article 10 of the Italian Constitution recites, in Italy, the right of asylum is guaranteed to those “who are prevented from the exercise of their democratic liberties”3 in their home country. The government response to asylum requests can take up to two years. During that time and as a result of that delay, asylum seekers are hosted in a variety of reception centers, awaiting the government response. Governmental delays are part and parcel of the creation and proliferation of migrant spaces. In Border as Method, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson argue that waiting, withdrawal, and delay are among

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the disciplinary strategies that governments enact at borders in order to filter and govern labor mobilities (Mezzadra and Neilson132). However, those borderscapes for queer migrants and refugees may also be filled with homophobic and transphobic tensions. As far as the reception of queer refugees is concerned, the Italian National Queer Association, Arcygay, points to two main issues: the assumption that all migrants are heterosexual and the binary construction of gay-man/lesbian-woman, which fail to account for different forms of gender/sexual identification. In 2008, Arcigay organized the first seminar to sensitize and train people to the care of queer migrants, including sex workers. Over the years, as the phenomenon has become more complex so have the spaces and the practices acquiring even an online dimension. In 2016, Lybian refugee Amani Zreba denounced the lack of training of officers and staff in Italian reception centers via the website of Il grande colibrì, an LGBTQI activism project in Italy. Zreba writes: The seekers find themselves to face episodes of homophonia, transphobia, bullying and in many cases violence on the guests who live with them within the structures of reception. This situation forces them to look for other places, outside of the reception centers or even to escape from the country in which they requested asylum, as it happened to two Armenian transsexuals.4 At times, fear and discrimination among queer migrants may come not merely from Italian officers, but also from their fellow nationals. An asylum seeker, Zreba explains, “encounters some fellow nationals and s/he is often forced to re-live the pain until s/he obtains the permit and the approval of asylum”5 To counter the spread of sexual bullying and gendered violence, new spaces of reception have been created to meet temporarily the needs of LGBTQI migrants and asylum seekers.6 Among them is “Omosessualità e Immigrazioni,” which was founded by the same Amani Zreba.7 We can also find Migra LGB-Cooperativa Ruah, Sportello Migranti LGBT Milano, Certi diritti, Movimento Identità Trans, and Il grande colibrì, which all provide free services, legal support to migrants, and training for volunteers. Another key example of infrastructure is the Clinic for the Rights of Immigration and Citizenship,8 a project birthed in 2010 by the Department of Law at the University of Rome III, under the supervision of Enrica Rigo. The clinic is an experimental laboratory aimed at combining jurisprudence theory and the practice and application of migrant rights. The clinic has a “sportello legale” (a front desk), operative all year long, from which students offer orientation on rights to migrants and asylum seekers, under the supervision of attorneys who are leading experts in the immigration field. The clinic is particularly active in promoting the application of the Istanbul Convention, which insists on the protection of individuals from gendered violence.9 All these new platforms, equipped with a rich online dimension for the dissemination of information, are signs of the many productive tensions that the border enables. They also represent forms of migrant governance and of autonomous infrastructures, which Mezzadra references as “ciudades

Mobile reorientations 105 refugio” in an interview to the Revista Contexto y Acción (2018). Like autonomous infrastructures, these new (queer) migrant centers and platforms, organized by the efforts of migrants and citizens together, emerge as forms of intersectional and transitional governance. They also function as modes of differential inclusion, a concept borrowed by Mezzadra and Neilson from feminism and race studies to signify borderscapes in which migrants cease to be the marginal inhabitants of borderscapes in order to become the “central protagonists in the drama of composing the space, time and materiality of the social itself” (Mezzadra and Neilson 73). Border-crossing has over the years represented a preoccupying image for governments and media alerting people to images of rescued boats, floating bodies, intrusive strangers, and the Mediterranean crisis. Against those technologies of media control, it is useful to look instead at these new spaces of political reorganization as differently preoccupied spaces. Here I am using “preoccupied” with the connotation that literary scholar of migration Teresa Fiore deploys in her book Pre-Occupied Spaces. Fiore urges us to look at spaces occupied by migrants for the transformative potential they hold toward the cultural discourse itself. As all forms of inclusion, those spaces may lend themselves to discipline and control. However, and more importantly, they also point to the emergence of new forms of political action and coalitional politics that ultimately disrupt the politics of the nation-state to look beyond it.

Notes 1 Translated from Italian: “i rifugiati con diversi orientamenti sessuali o identità di genere hanno diritto a un posto particolare per preservare la loro privacy e difenderli dalle persecuzioni e dallo scherno?” See https://www.ilgrandecolibri.com/centro-a ccoglienza-lgbt/. Last access 1/19/2020. 2 Since 1958, with the Merlin Law, named after the Venetian socialist senator, Lina Merlin, prostitution is legal. But it is illegal for it to be instigated, or for exploiting or procuring sexual services. See https://7dnews.com/article/italy-wants-to-regulate-pros titution. 3 “Lo straniero, al quale sia impedito nel suo paese l’effettivo esercizio delle libertà democratiche garantite dalla Costituzione italiana, ha diritto d’asilo nel territorio della Repubblica, secondo le condizioni stabilite dalla legge.” in https://www.interno.gov.it/ it/temi/immigrazione-e-asilo/protezione-internazionale. 4 Translation is mine from the webpage: “Episodi di omofobia, transfobia, bullismo e in molti casi violenza da parte degli ospiti che vivono con loro all’interno delle strutture di accoglienza. Questo li costringe a cercare altri posti, esterni ai centri di accoglienza, o a fuggire dal paese in cui hanno chiesto asilo, come è successo a due transessuali armene.” 5 Translation is mine from the webpage: “[I]ncontra dei paesani e spesso è costretto a vivere di nuovo la sofferenza fino a quando ottiene il permesso e l’approvazione della domanda d’asilo.” 6 “Persecuted Beyond Borders: Why Italy needs LGBT refugee shelters.” 7 http://www.arcigaymilano.org/Web/io/. 8 “Clinica dei Diritti dell’Immigrazione e della Cittadinanza,” see https://clinicalegale .giur.uniroma3.it/. 9 See http://giurisprudenza.uniroma3.it/didattica/cliniche-legali/clinica-del-diritto-delli mmigrazione-e-della-cittadinanza/. Last access: 1/19/2020.

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Works cited Farias de Albuquerque, Fernanda. “Princesa.” Mediterranean Crossroads. Ed. Graziella Parati. Trans. María Ponce de León. Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999. 130–145. Fiore, Teresa. Pre-occupied Spaces. Remapping Italy’s Transnational Migrations and Colonial Legacies. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017. Gartner, Johannes Lukas. “In-credibly Queer: Sexuality-based Asylum in the EU.” Transatlantic Perspectives on Diplomacy and Diversity, Ed. Anthony Chase. New York: Humanity in Action Press, 2015, 39–66. https://www.humanityinaction.org/kn owledge_detail/incredibly-queer-sexuality-based-asylum-in-the-european-union/. Last access: 1/19/2020. Mai, Nicola. Sexual Humanitarianism: An Intimate Auto-Ethnography, Sex Work and Humanitarian Borders. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Mezzadra, Sandro and Brett Neilson. Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. Piscitelli, Adriana. “Transits: Brazilian Women Migration in the Context of the Transnationalization of the Sex and Marriage Markets.” Horizontes Antropologicos. 2008. Vol. 4. http://socialsciences.scielo.org/pdf/s_ha/v4nse/scs_a11.pdf. Last access 1/19/2020. Preciado, Paul B. Testo Junkie. Sex, Drugs and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. New York: Feminist Press, 2013. Torrisi, Claudia. “Persecuted Beyond Borders: Why Italy needs LGBT Refugee Shelters”. September 2017. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/persecuted-beyond-borders -italy-lgbt-refugees/. Last access 1/19/2020. Vartabedian, Julieta. Brazilian Travesti Migrations. Gender, Sexualities and Embodiment Experiences. London: Palgrave McMillan, 2018. Zreba, Amani. “Centri per richiedenti asilo LGBT: privilegio o protezione.” Blog in Il grande colobrì. October 31, 2016. https://www.ilgrandecolibri.com/centro-accoglienza -lgbt/. Last access: 1/19/2020.

Filmography Princesa.2001. 94 minutes.

8

Resilience beyond cruelty Central American migrants pursuing the American dream Ana Del Sarto

Violence in Central America has been pushing away the economically active population for the benefit of global capital. During the twenty-first century, the torturous experience of Central American migrants – mainly women, children, and families – who traverse Mexico toward the United States has been socially and ethnically advantageous, as well as politically and economically productive not only for the United States and Mexico, but also for global capitalism. The mobilization of people diversifies societies. New social groups can shake up stifled social structures, prompting the need for new cognitive mappings to account for the presence of social, racial, and ethnic alterities. As newcomers, undocumented migrants are placed at the bottom of social echelons. They are the outsiders, the foreigners, those who represent the socially, ethnically, and racially other; a sector against which the “original” population will be measured. These outcasts are often used to “purify” social boundaries among citizens, and to reshuffle the US population according to political divides. More importantly, aside from this internal political uses, current migration constitutes great transnational business, since it energizes all the countries involved: the country of origin, the receiving country, and the countries traversed in between. Today Latin America is considered one of the most violent regions in the world. In 2019, of the top 50 most dangerous cities in the world, 43 were from this region: 15 from Mexico, 14 from Brazil, and 6 from Venezuela; 2 from each Colombia and Honduras, and one from each El Salvador, Guatemala, and Jamaica.1 Although Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador (known as the Northern Triangle of Central America [NTCA]) went down in the rankings of violence, this still is an endemic phenomenon, which keeps pushing people out of their lands (Amnesty International “Fleeing…” np). Nearly half of the approximately 3.5 million Central American immigrants residing in the United States as of 2017 established their residence there before 2000. Immigrants from the NTCA comprised an 86% of the Central Americans in the United States. In 2017, Central American immigrants represented 8% of the United States 46.4 million immigrants. (O’Connor, Batalova and Botler, “Central American …” np)

108 Ana Del Sarto Many of these migrants had been mobilizing voluntarily for family reunification purposes. However, after 2008, “the migration politics of revolving doors” changed (Izcara-Palacios “La precarización…” 112). The 2018–2019 escalation of Central American caravan arrivals to the southern border of the United States responds to many factors, all of them related to the logic of biocapitalism, but particularly to the pursuit of working opportunities. Many migrants barely survive in their countries of origin. In order to overcome many times extreme circumstances, they are willing to accept not only the risks of a dangerous journey, but also the precarious working conditions imposed on them in the country of destination, in order to support their families, who often remain in their home country. Consequently, American companies can keep on exploiting these disposable people at the lowest possible cost, subjecting them to unacceptable working conditions, without being responsible for abuses. New forms of indenture servitude and enslavement are created through recruiting companies, which do not guarantee migrants any kind of safety or legalization. When migrants are caught working undocumented in the United States, they are sent to detention centers and become candidates for deportation. Despite all these obstacles, the imaginary of the American Dream is still alive and unshakable among the poor in Central America. Izcara-Palacios has studied the interactions between Central American migrants and Mexican coyotes since the beginning of this century ( Izcara-Palacios “El coyotaje…,” “De víctimas…,” “Violencia…,” “Coyotaje and Drugs…,” “Los transmigrantes…”). One of the most salient new features of current transnational migration to the United States is that the motivations to migrate are not necessarily spontaneous anymore.2 Instead, in many cases migrants are directly sought by American employers, looking for cheap and submissive laborers through intermediaries who facilitate initial contacts with employers (Izacara-Palacios “Contrabando de migrantes…” 2 y 8). This and other structural changes are contributing to the reconfiguration of global working conditions: while neoliberal finance capitalism encompasses the entire world, the logic of biocapitalism – the capitalist subsumption of the bios or the commodification of life – keeps on incorporating the remotest and most disconnected regions into the global market. In Central America, living conditions continue to worsen due to systemic violence, a combination of economic exploitation, political instability, social domination, racial and ethnic discrimination, and gender and sexual disparities. These structural conditions trigger massive migrations of women and children who leave their countries in spite of the immense risks they face in their migratory journeys. Even though they experience many abuses while in transit, they demonstrate persistence and resilience when they start their life in the United States as undocumented workers, if they are lucky enough to reach their goals. Without a doubt, these sectors are among the most vulnerable and deprived social groups in the receiving country (the “nobodies,” according to Linda Green). As asylum-seekers, they are labeled as “illegals” and criminalized. Many are arrested in detention centers known as hieleras (refrigerators), until they are either legalized or deported. According to Green, “migration is one of the few remaining survival

Resilience beyond cruelty 109 strategies for many. At the same time, migration has exacerbated economic and social divisions further eroding any sense of collective solidarity or possibility of struggle” (372). These “illegal nobodies” are not only dispossessed by displacement, but also stripped of dignity, dehumanized, and subjected to constant shame, fear, and uncertainty about their futures. However, even though their migrant condition is psychologically, racially, and ethnically devastating, they fulfill a very important social and economic purpose. As it is well known, their remittances are indispensable for the survival of whole families and communities back home, as well as the sustenance of weak national economies. In many cases, after long periods of persistent efforts, their own lives become more livable, and they become relatively integrated into the new environment. From a Latin American cultural studies perspective, I will analyze how Central American migrants, once they have successfully crossed the border and established themselves in the United States to start a new life as undocumented aliens, must confront and endure a daily life of perils, instability, and fear. According to Oscar Martínez, migrants know that, particularly in the case of women, “their role is to be a second-class human [an infra-human]. Migrant and woman equals easy target” ( Los migrantes… 59; my translation). The main corpus of this chapter is based on chronicles and documentaries produced by investigative journalists, personal testimonies, and other forms of ethnographic research, as well as on statistics from the Pew Research Center, the Migration Policy Institute, the United Nations, and the World Bank. Other materials used for this study include anthropological and sociological articles, Farmer Associations’ and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s reports. Finally, some information originates in legal cases in the United States. One of the goals of this study is to highlight the violations of human rights suffered by migrants as undocumented aliens.

Politics of survival and endurance After the 2008 economic and financial crises, different deterrence strategies were applied by the Obama and Trump administrations. This included, during the Obama administration, the implementation of ambiguous immigration law enforcement, especially toward minors. Trump has been using a heavy and harshly loaded rhetoric about what he offensively called “shithole countries,” whose “criminal, rapist, and indecent inhabitants” are “invading” and “infesting” the US Southern border (Cohn, Passel and González-Barrera, “Rise in U.S…” and “Recent Trends…”). Oftentimes these persons are not classified as voluntary economic migrants, but as displaced populations fleeing violence, extreme poverty, hunger, and death (Borger, “Fleeing…”). However, not all violence is the same in the NTCA countries. While these countries share high levels of systemic violence,3 organized criminal conflicts or instrumental violence carried out either by Mexican Cartels (particularly Los Zetas) or Salvadoran maras (such as MS-13 and Barrio 18) hit them differently. The same can be said about domestic and gender violence. Narco violence is more prominent in rural areas. For example, Mexican Cartels convinced rural communities in the Guatemalan highlands to replace their

110 Ana Del Sarto crops with poppies, but later the central government and local authorities, under pressure from the United States, forced them to eradicate “the plant” from their fields (González, “A Dangerous…” np). On top of that, since 2018, several natural disasters and droughts impoverished rural communities even more, making their life extremely precarious. Gang violence usually occurs more in the cities, and is directed toward the goal of dividing the neighborhoods and controlling territories. Their objectives are to extort people, recruit boys, and use girls as sexual objects. Gender and domestic violence are endemic in most of these settings (Cantor and Plewa, “Forced …”). State intervention is generally absent, and infrastructures are usually insufficient. Consequently, the convergence of an ineffective judiciary system, the negligence of the police, and the existence of widespread corruption, favor the proliferation of violence and impunity (Leutert, “Who is…”).4 It is interesting to recognize that although the flow of undocumented migrants tended to diminish for a couple of years, in the first half of 2019 alone, it tripled. In addition to systemic and criminal violence, these populations are heavily affected by climate change – desertification to be specific – a crucial pushing factor. Families who depend on the products of their land cannot feed themselves due to droughts and territorial devastation. So, they send one of their offspring to work abroad in the hope that her/his remittances would allow the family to cope with daily needs. Looking at the rate of remittances reported by the World Bank, it is easy to understand why they keep on migrating to the United States: migration of family members, often of women and children, is the last survival tool for the entire family (Ratha et al, “Data Release…”).5 This is the bottom-line explanation to the movement of Central Americans along the dangerous Mexican corridor. President Trump has threatened many times with massive arrests of undocumented immigrants.6 Through the vigorous use of the politics of fear – and the practice of unexpected raids and removal of millions of illegal workers through massive deportations – he declared a border emergency crisis in order to justify the need to build a physical barrier to contain the “invasion of drugs, gangs, and thugs,” dangerous criminal, vicious rapists, and spiteful assassins. He has insistently indicated that he continues to strengthen what is supposed to be the “world’s largest immigrant detention system” (Reichman, “Crisis…”; Watkins and Kohut, “MS-13…”; and Kassie, “Detained…”). Nevertheless, Central American migrants, either in caravans, small groups, or individually, keep on migrating to the United States, in the hope that their special status (TPS) would allow them to apply for asylum (Cohn, Passel and Bialik, “Many Immigrants…”). According to Leutert and Spalding (Lawfare), during the past five years, around 265,000 people traveled annually from the Northern Triangle toward the United States. However, during the first half of 2019, a total of 508,000 migrants applied for asylum in the United States, including many families with children, thus putting a great amount of pressure on the US immigration system, and saturating detention centers (Ingber, “Undocumented Children…” np). Historically, Central American migrants started arriving in the United States in the 1980s, fleeing civil wars and poverty. These mobilizations reached their peak in the 2000s. Since 1990, the flow of Central American women migrants

Resilience beyond cruelty 111 have increased in the route through Mexico to the United States. In Las viajeras invisibles, Ana Silvia Monzón indicates that one of the most important leading factors behind the increment of migrant women was the inflexibility and the harsh implementation of the patriarchal mandate in relation to work and economic opportunities, family and community stigmas, gender violence, and their exercise of autonomy. In addition, according to the Global Burden of Armed Violence, which provides statistics about the countries with the highest female average of annual homicide rates for the years 2007–2012, NTCA countries are placed in the top ranks. El Salvador, with 14.4%, tops the ranking, followed by Honduras, with 10.9%, and Guatemala in fourth place with a 9.1% (GBAV, “Lethal …” np, and UNHCR, Women on the Run). Leutert also confirms that around 2014 “Central American women averaged between 20 to 32%” of the migrants apprehended by the Border Patrol. “In recent years these numbers have increased even more, with women constituting 48% of all Salvadoran migrants … and Honduran women reaching 43%.” Later, she adds, “this change is much more dramatic when looking at families and unaccompanied minors,” which “average between 40 to 60% of the migrants from Central American arriving to the US” (Leutert, “Who is Really Crossing…” np). In order to examine some of the terrible experiences of Central American undocumented migrants in the United States, I will resort to three documentaries presented by Frontline, a Public Broadcasting Television (PBS) program, which featured human trafficking and sexual abuse cases related to the Latinx undocumented workers. The documentaries were written, directed, and produced by the Investigative Reporting Program, chaired by Lowell Bergman, at the Graduate School of Journalism, UC Berkeley, during a span of five years (2013–2018), and freely aired through PBS. They are: Rape in the Fields (June 15, 2013), Rape on the Night Shifts (June 23, 2015, and reviewed, updated, and aired again January 16, 2018), and Trafficked in America (April 24, 2018). The most important sectors in which the Latinx find jobs are construction, agribusiness (fruits, egg farms, dairy, meat and meat packaging, among others), care industry (child and elderly care, health care), the industry of hospitality, travel and leisure (hotels, restaurants, and related services), and home domestic service (cleaning, gardening, etc.), services that are generally performed by undocumented laborers (Jordan, “8 Million…,” New American Economy, “Undocumented…,” and Dudley, “These U.S…”). To understand the upsurge of women and children migrants, we need to look carefully to the composition of the US workforce in all of those sectors: the agribusiness industry counts for more than half a million undocumented women workers, while 1.3 million out of the total 2.4 million janitors are also undocumented (Elejalde-Ruiz, “Hospitality…,” and U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics “Occupational…”). Meat packing, egg farming, and dairies are sectors that hire more than half of their workers among migrants, many of whom are undocumented minors. “These businesses, which operate 24/7, year-round, require work that some farmers insist most Americans will not do. … Immigrants work harder” (Hall & Veterkind, “How undocumented…”).7

112 Ana Del Sarto All food industries have to compete within a global market, which means that they need to keep their costs of production as low as possible. Wages in particular are maintained as close as possible to those in Mexico. So, remunerations in these sectors are not ruled by national averages – which are per se extremely depressed – but by transnational labor markets – which push wages down to the bottom. Therefore, jobs in the food industries require long working hours of hard physical labor (many times up to 12 hours shifts), while wages are below regular standards (depending on the state, they could range from $7 to $15 an hour) (National Farm Worker Ministry, “Low Wages”). In 2016, the states of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Washington passed laws to increase the minimum salary to $15 an hour; after that, due to the activism of the “Fight for $15” movement, “California, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, SeaTac and Washington DC” also approved it.8 In California, the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), the United Farm Workers (UFW), and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) were able to exert enough pressure to change some working conditions. Not surprisingly, salary increases in agribusiness had the negative effect of many Farm companies moving to Mexico in order to avoid the higher costs of the workforce within the United States. In Marion, Ohio, on April 24, 2018, a transnational human trafficking ring was uncovered when four Guatemalan adolescents were found living in enslaved conditions inside the trailer park of Trillium egg farms. In Trafficked in America, Daffodil Altan, a journalist from the UC Berkeley IRP, followed this criminal transnational network, which connected Trillium Farms (a Jack DeCoster company, located in Ohio very close to where I live), to the Western Highlands of Guatemala. In 2014, a US immigrant from Guatemala, Aroldo Castillo, went back to his village to offer help to desolate families, with the option to bring some of their teenagers to work in the United States so they could send money back home. Before eight teenagers had departed, their families signed contracts for $15,000 each to cover the costs for traveling, crossing borders, and placing them in decent jobs. These minors ended up being enslaved in the most horrific conditions in the countryside of Marion, Ohio. Pablo Durán Sr., along with his brother, Ezequiel Durán (a manager inside Trillium Farms), were the leaders of Haba, a recruiting company, which subcontracted crews of laborers from other companies. One of them was owned by his son, Pablo Durán Jr. Ironically, it never occurred to any of them that they needed to check the legal status of those workers, their living conditions, and the wages they were paid. They just made sure the products (eggs) were shipped on time. When John Glessner, ex-CEO from Trillium, was interviewed by Daffodil Altan, he declared that “the conditions in which they were living were far better than those from which they were in their own countries.” In Rape in the Fields (2013) and Rape on the Night Shifts (2015), Lowell Bergman explains why sexual assault, sexual abuse, and even rape constitute an epidemic and remain mostly unreported. Undocumented women workers in agribusiness call their place of work the “fields del calzón,” or “the panty fields,” because of the high rate of rape and sexual harassment to which they are exposed daily by their foremen or supervisors, who are also Latinx migrants. Symbolically

Resilience beyond cruelty 113 and materially significant differences separate these supervisors from the women workers: they are males, they speak English, and they are US citizens or legal residents. These three elements offer them the little extra power to abuse women and reproduce the unequal gender relations fostered in their own countries. The possibilities of reporting these cases or denouncing the abusers are virtually impossible for these women, since they often have no hard evidence of their abuses to present, and as their managers usually claim, “[N]o one will believe what you will say. … [Y]ou will never be able to prove it.” But, the extraordinary obstacle is the possible phone call that these managers use as a threat: “[I]f you denounce me, I call la migra and you will not only lose your job, but be deported.” This is the classic quid pro quo situation and, the worst part is that, as everyone knows, the undocumented worker must accept anything to keep the job and be able to remain in the country. The problems with these complaints to the police and/or the legal investigations is that they make the working population yet more vulnerable, because “if the worker denounces, the manager/foreman calls to report her/him as an illegal worker.” The ultimate responsibility lies in the undocumented worker who thereby is criminalized and, consequently, arrested and deported. Shame and fear feed the laborers’ minds: fear of the call; shame toward other people and themselves; fear of the possibility of being deported, of losing their job, and of not being able to support their children. The trauma “of not even know how they should have reacted, felt, what they should have done” – as one of them confesses – paralyzes them. Women feel shame, guilt, the trauma of not having been able to avoid being raped, and the profound pain of feeling that they have betrayed their partners or husbands, their daughters and sons, even themselves. The burden of keeping the secret becomes an overwhelming load that only increases as time goes by. The result of facing these unjust and violent realities is a loss of self-esteem, which not only keeps the undocumented people under control, but also establishes a routine of subordination and submissiveness. “To see, to hear, to shut up” is exactly the same culture that rules in many Central American countries under criminal organized violence, as shown in Zamora Chamorro’s documentary, Mary in Nobody’s Land, as well as in Martínez’ chronicles from The Beast and History of Violence. This cycle of women’s abuse and violation many times feeds anger, rage, and violence toward themselves and those close to them. The feeling of powerlessness in relation to their lived experiences is the worst situation the victims have to confront, because when there is no outlet for these emotions, a new cycle of violence is being produced, and the protective mechanisms of resilience keep corroding. Through this chapter, two constant features became clear. First, most of the abuses come from other Latinx migrants, Spanish speakers in charge of the hiring and supervision of migrant women and children. The patriarchal logic of unequal gender relations and gender violence against women, the masculinity mandate, is translated and reproduced from their own cultural milieu to the new one, from the national social setting to the transnational labor market. Most managers or “mayordomos” are documented immigrant Latino men who abuse the power they have to humiliate and keep under control an undocumented female and minor

114 Ana Del Sarto Latinx work force. In so doing, they reinforce racially and ethnically motivated discrimination (“look to those savages how they relate to one another,” the same mechanism that makes white Anglo-Saxon people feel better and superior). A U-visa, immigration relief for victims of a crime, is issued only when a law enforcement officer can claim that somebody was victim of a crime (USDHS, “U Visa”). Paradoxically, this possibility renders women much more vulnerable and disposable, when in reality they are indispensable. The second constant feature is the legal scheme of outsourcing, at many levels and for different purposes, especially in relation to hiring and control of labor crews. Big companies do not hire their workers directly anymore; they outsource their hiring processes, subcontracting workers through a system of ghost companies. This is more efficient, less expensive, and involves no legal responsibilities to the company. They are never accountable either for the selection or the status of those workers, which many times end up being victims of human trafficking.

Closing remarks Since the 1990s, the free and democratic capitalist world along with the Western modern-colonial culture obtained one of its most exceptional and perverse triumphs, the structural adjustment programs, which endorse the global biocapitalist design for the twenty-first century. This model is supposed to be imposed on the entire world. The free market is the central device where social relations are articulated, capital feels unregulated, and labor is flexible, precarious, and feminized. Minorities, women, children, and the global poor are made more vulnerable, discriminated against, and racialized. Along those dispositifs, the technological and digital revolution speed up communications to suggest that most of the material processes are unnecessary because robots are here to work for us. In other words, the global world is now organized by a blatant and violent biocapitalism, where certain humans are reduced to being nothing more than the living dead (Agamben) and others, the fewest, are the protagonists of the turbo-capitalism of adrenaline and happiness forever. In Cruel Modernity, Jean Franco analyzes cruelty as the main feature of our contemporary global culture, demonstrating that “when the taboo against harming another is broken, there can be no limits, no social pact” (1). For Rita Laura Segato, this cruelty is a patriarchal pedagogy that launches an informal lowintensity war against female and feminized bodies to continue expropriating and commodifying life in all its forms (Segato, La guerra… 57). She develops this idea further, arguing that “the pedagogy of cruelty” is the transmutation of life into commodity: “the living and its vitality into things.” “Human Trafficking and sexual exploitation are the most perfect examples of this.” How do we contest it? Segato affirms that we can only fight it by “undoing the masculinity mandate,” which is to say “the ownership mandate” (Segato, “Pedagogía…” np). No wonder, then, why violence has been so endemic in the Northern Triangle of Central America, causing so much fear, so much horror, and continues to expel out of the region the most distraught and wretched of populations. Inside

Resilience beyond cruelty 115 their own countries, people feel unprotected because there are no mechanisms of social integration and contention (employment for the economically active population, education for children, health and food for everyone). States are only present to collect benefits shared by global investments and capital, but they are completely absent to protect their citizens, not even the most vulnerable of all, their children. Hence, why and how Central American women and children would care if they become undocumented and overexploited in the United States, where at least they could find a job, even though under dreadful conditions? Even though they do so at the highest imaginable costs, hastily wasting their bodies and their lives, sleeping in overcrowded rooms and many times sharing beds, these migrants at least have a chance to improve living conditions for them and their families, the possibility to have a future, and a chance to realize the dubious American dream.

Notes 1 The most up-to-date statistic was published by USA Today, August 14, 2019. (https ://www.usatoday.com/picture-gallery/travel/news/2019/07/24/most-dangerous-cities -world-tijuana-caracas-cape-town/1813211001/). This statistic does not include war zones, such as Syria and Ukraine. The usual causes given for this endemic violence are drug trafficking, organized crime, political instability, poverty, economic conditions, corruption, abuses, and impunity. 2 There are many debates about the productivity of social capital as a concept. This notion was theoretically developed by Pierre Bourdieu. It soon spread from the field of sociology to other social sciences, and in particular to the area of migration studies. Alejandro Portes has published two important articles on this concept, “Social Capital: Its Origins and Applications in Modern Sociology” and “The Two Meanings of Social Capital.” According to Portes, it originally referred to a “differential performance,” or benefits accruing to individuals or families by virtue of their ties with others” (Portes, “The Two…” 1-2). The concept soon implied also “information about or direct assistance with migrating provided by prior migrants, which decreases the cost of moving for potential migrants” (Garip, “Social Capital…” 5). 3 The percentage of population living below the poverty line in Honduras is 61.9% (2018), in Guatemala 59.3% (2014), and in El Salvador 29.2% (2017), according to indicators from The World Bank. See https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.N AHC. 4 Even when these three countries of the NTCA shared many socio-historical characteristics, and violence is so pervasive in all of them, Stephanie Leutert (Director of the Mexico Security Initiative at the University of Texas, Austin, and regular collaborator for the Lawfare blog), suggests in “Who´s Really Crossing the U.S. Border, and Why They´re Coming” that we need to abandon “the depiction of the ‘Northern Triangle’ of Central America as a homogenous region.” Certainly, there are salient demographic heterogeneities and dissimilarities among these countries, which affect the migration trends and its push factors: the data show that in terms of ethnic composition, while Guatemala is 40% indigenous, Honduras is just 10%, while in El Salvador, indigenous population is very small, with a meager 0.2%. Moreover, El Salvador is mostly urbanized, while Honduras and Guatemala are only 50% urban. Leutert, Lawfare, https://ww w.lawfareblog.com/whos-really-crossing-us-border-and-why-theyre-coming 5 See World Bank, data release for 2019, https://blogs.worldbank.org/peoplemove/data-r elease-remittances-low-and-middle-income-countries-track-reach-551-billion-2019.

116 Ana Del Sarto 6 See Rose, “President Trump Threatens Mass Deportation of Immigrants,” NPR, June 18, 2019. https://www.npr.org/2019/06/18/733809249/president-trump-threatens-mas s-deportation-of-immigrants. 7 In the same article, Neil Rainford, “a long-time labor activist,” an ex-union representative from the Madison area, declared: “undocumented workers do not qualify for public benefits … meaning they have to ‘labor without the basic social protections that are part of our social and legal compact, are easily exploited, suffer sub-market wages and benefits and are denied many of the basic minimums that we have agreed upon as a society’” (Hall & Vetterkind, “How undocumented…”). 8 See Tamara Draut, “Is this your image of the working class? You need to update it,” The Guardian, May 9, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/ may/09/american-working-class-what-it-looks-like-today and “How to Fight for $15 Transformed the Political Debate,” March 31, 2016, https://talkpoverty.org/2016/03 /31/fight-for-15-transformed-political-debate/.

Works cited “50 of the Most Dangerous Cities in the World.” USA Today, August 14, 2019. https://ww w.usatoday.com/picture-gallery/travel/news/2019/07/24/most-dangerous-cities-world -tijuana-caracas-cape-town/1813211001/ Altan, Daffodil and Andrés Ceidel. Trafficked in America. Frontline, PBS. Aired on April 24, 2018. Investigative Reporting Program at U.C. Berkeley. https://www.pbs.org/ wgbh/frontline/article/inside-the-hidden-reality-of-labor-trafficking-in-america/ Amnesty International. Fleeing for our Lives: Central American Migrant Crisis. https:// www.amnestyusa.org/fleeing-for-our-lives-central-american-migrant-crisis/ Bergman, Lowell. Rape in the Fields. Frontline, PBS, Aired on June 25, 2013. Investigative Reporting Program at U.C. Berkeley. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/rape-in -the-fields/ Bergman, Lowell. Rape on the Night Shift. Frontline, PBS, Aired the First Time on June 23, 2015 and Reviewed and Aired Again on January 16, 2018. Investigative Reporting Program at U.C. Berkeley. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/rape-on-the-night -shift/ Borger, Julian. “Fleeing a Hell the US Helped Create: Why Central American Journey North.” The Guardian, December 19, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news /2018/dec/19/central-america-migrants-us-foreign-policy Cantor, David and Malte Plewa. “Forced Displacement and Violent Crime: a Humanitarian Crisis in Central America?” Humanitarian Practice Network (HPN). https://odihpn.org /magazine/forced-displacement-violent-crime/ Cohn, D´Vera, Jeffrey Passel and Kristen Bialik. Many Immigrants with Temporary Protected Status Face Uncertain Future in U.S. Pew Research Center. https://ww w.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/03/08/immigrants-temporary-protected-status -in-us/ Cohn, D´Vera, Jeffrey Passel and Ana González-Barrera. “Rise in U.S. Immigrants From El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras Outpaces Growth from Elsewhere.” Pew Research Center, December 7, 2017. https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2017/12/ 07/rise-in-u-s-immigrants-from-el-salvador-guatemala-and-honduras-outpaces-growth -from-elsewhere/ Draut, Tamara. “How to Fight for $15 Transformed the Political Debate.” Talk Poverty, March 31, 2016. https://talkpoverty.org/2016/03/31/fight-for-15-transformed-politicaldebate/

Resilience beyond cruelty 117 Draut, Tamara. “Is This Your Image of the Working Class? You Need to Update It.” The Guardian, May 9, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/09/a merican-working-class-what-it-looks-like-today Dudley, Mary-Jo. “These U.S. Industries Can’t Work Without Illegal Immigrants.” CBS News, January 10, 2019. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/illegal-immigrants-us-jobs -economy-farm-workers-taxes/ Elejalde-Ruiz, Alexia. “Hospitality Industry Needs More Immigrant Workers to Survive, Report Says.” Chicago Tribune, August 24, 2017. http://www.chicagotribune .com/business/ct-hospitality-needs-more-immigrants-report-0825-biz-20170824story.html Franco, Jean. Cruel Modernity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. Garip, Filiz. Social Capital and Migration: How Do Similar Resources Lead to Divergent Outcomes? https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/garip/files/social_capital_and_mig.pdf GBAV (Global Burdened of Armed Violence). “Lethal Violence Against Women and Girls.” Global Burdened of Armed Violence 2015: Every Body Counts. The Geneva Declaration, 2015. http://www.genevadeclaration.org/fileadmin/docs/GBAV3/G BAV3_Ch3_pp87-120.pdf González, Daniel. “A Dangerous Red Flower Is Driving Record Number of Migrants to Flee Guatemala.” USA Today, September 26, 2019. Green, Linda. “The Nobodies: Neoliberalism, Violence, and Migration.” Medical Anthropology 30–34 (2011): 366–385. Hall, Dee J. and Riley Vetterkind. “How Undocumented Immigrants Became the Backbone of Dairies – And How to Keep the Milk Flowing in America’s Dairyland.” Wisconsin Watch, October 6, 2017, https://www.wisconsinwatch.org/2017/10/how-undocum ented-immigrants-became-the-backbone-of-dairies-and-how-to-keep-the-milk-flowing -in-americas-dairyland/ Ingber, Sasha. “Undocumented Children Fuel New Tension on Immigration in Virginia.” National Geographic. August 16, 2014. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/ 2014/8/140814-immigration-children-manassas-prince-william-county-hispanics-anti -immigrant/ Izcara-Palacios, Simón Pedro. “Coyotaje and Drugs: Two Different Businesses.” Bulletin of Latin American Research 34, no. 3 (2015): 324–339. Izcara-Palacios, Simón Pedro. “Los transmigrantes centroamericanos.” Latin American Research Review 50, no. 4 (2015): 49–68. Izcara-Palacios, Simón Pedro. “Violencia postestructural: migrantes centroamericanos y cárteles de la droga en México.” Revista de estudios sociales 16 (2016): 12–25. Izcara-Palacios, Simón Pedro. “El coyotaje visto desde la mirada de mujeres migrantes centroamericanas.” Perfiles Latinoamericanos 25, no. 49 (2017a): 1–19. Izcara-Palacios, Simón Pedro. “Contrabando de migrantes y demanda laboral.” Andamios 14, no. 35 (2017b): 359–378. Izcara-Palacios, Simón Pedro. “De víctimas de trata a victimarios: los agentes facilitadores del cruce fronterizo reclutados por los carteles mexicanos. / From Victims of Trafficking to Felons: Migrant Smugglers Recruited by Mexican Cartels.” Estudios Fronterizos 18, no. 37 (2017c): 41–60. Izcara-Palacios, Simón Pedro. “La precarización extrema en el mercado de trabajo agrario.” Colombia Internacional 89 (2017d): 109–132. Jordan, Miriam. “8 Million People Are Working Illegally in the U.S. Here´s Why That´s Unlikely to Change.” The New York Time. December 11, 2018. https://www.nytimes. com/2018/12/11/us/undocumented-immigrant-workers.html?auth=login-google

118 Ana Del Sarto Kassie, Emily. “Detained. How the US Built the World’s Largest Immigrant Detention System.” The Guardian, September 24, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news /2019/sep/24/detained-us-largest-immigrant-detention-trump Leutert, Stephanie. “Why Central Americans Keep Coming.” Lawfare, September 13, 2016. https://www.lawfareblog.com/why-central-americans-keep-coming Leutert, Stephanie. “Who’s Really Crossing the U.S. Border, and Why They’re Coming”. "Information Clearing House" February 15, 2019. Np. http://www.informationclearing house.info/51108.htm Leutert, Stephanie. “One County, 650 Migrant Deaths: An Introduction.” Lawfare, September 27, 2019. https://www.lawfareblog.com/one-county-650-migrant-deaths-in troduction Leutert, Stephanie and Sarah Spalding. “How Many Central American Are Traveling North?” Lawfare, March 14, 2019. https://www.lawfareblog.com/how-many-centralamericans-are-traveling-north Martínez, Oscar. The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail. London: Verso, 2014. Martínez, Oscar. Historia de la violencia. Vivir y morir en Centroamérica. México: Penguin Random House, 2016. Monzón, Ana Silvia. Las viajeras invisibles: mujeres migrantes en la región Centroamericana y el sur de México. Guatemala: PCS-CAMEX, 2006. National Farm Worker Ministry. Low Wages. http://nfwm.org/education-center/farm-wo rker-issues/low-wages/ New American Economy. Undocumented Immigrants. https://www.newamericaneconomy .org/issues/undocumented-immigrants/ O’Connor, Allison, Jeanne Batalova and Jessica Bolter. “Central American Immigrants in the United States.” Migration Information Source, Migration Policy Institute. August, 15, 2019. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/central-american-immigrants-un ited-states Portes, Alejandro. “Social Capital: Its Origins and Applications in Modern Sociology.” Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 1–24. Portes, Alejandro. “The Two Meanings of Social Capital.” Sociological Forum 15, no. 1 (2000): 1–12. Ratha, Dilip, Supriyo De, Eung Ju Kim, Sonia Plaza, Ganesh Seshan and Nadege Desiree Yameogo. “Data Release: Remittances to Low- and Middle-Income Countries on Track to Reach $551 Billion in 2019 and $597 Billion by 2021.” World Bank Blog, People Move, October 16, 2019. https://blogs.worldbank.org/peoplemove/data-release-rem ittances-low-and-middle-income-countries-track-reach-551-billion-2019 Reichman, Daniel. “Crisis at the Border? Anthropologist Looks at Central American Migration.” Newscenter, April 4, 2019. https://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/crisis-at -the-border-anthropologist-overview-central-american-migration-372762/ Rose, Joel. “President Trump Threatens Mass Deportation of Immigrants.” NPR, June 18, 2019. https://www.npr.org/2019/06/18/733809249/president-trump-threatens-mass -deportation-of-immigrants Segato, Rita Laura. La guerra contra las mujeres. Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños, 2016. Segato, Rita Laura. Pedagogías de la crueldad. El mandato de la masculinidad. (Fragmentos). 2019. https://www.revistadelauniversidad.mx/articles-files/9517d5d3 -4f92-4790-ad46-81064bf00a62 The World Bank. Poverty Headcount Ratio at National Poverty Lines (% of Population). https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.NAHC

Resilience beyond cruelty 119 UNHCR. Women on the Run. First Hand Accounts of Refugees Fleeing. El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and México. The UN Refugee Agency, October 2015. https:// www.unhcr.org/5630f24c6.pdf U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics. Occupational Outlook Handbook. https://www.bls.gov/ ooh/building-and-grounds-cleaning/janitors-and-building-cleaners.htm USDHS (United States Department of Homeland Security). U Visa Immigration Relief for Victims of Certain Crimes. https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/UVisa-Immigration-Relief-for-Victims-of-Certain-Crimes.pdf Watkins, Ali and Meridith Kohut. “MS-13, Trump and America´s Stake in El Salvador´s Gang War.” The New York Times, December 10, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018 /12/10/us/el-salvador-ms-13.html?ref=nyt-es&mcid=nyt-es&subid=article Zamora Chamorro, Marcela. María en tierra de nadie. María In Nobody’s Land. El Salvador: Ruido and El Faro.net, 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kup 7ZnDSPBQ

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Border art for a border ecology Ila Nicole Sheren

This chapter considers the possibility of creating border art within the framework of what I call a border ecology. With this term, I offer a way around one of the most pervasive contradictions surrounding environmental art. Any discussion of the environment necessarily entails nonhuman agencies, as well as an accounting for the human capacity for destruction. At the same time, such considerations of objects, things, and animals often develop a human-sized blind spot. The earth rewrites human history, while landscapes of human inequality shape the earth in turn. Drought, flood, scarcity, and abundance, all affect human migration patterns and shape cultural contact zones. Both the new materialist viewpoint and the postcolonial lens are necessary, I argue, to conceptualize the magnitude of the current environmental crisis. New materialism grants agency to objects and forces long neglected by the anthropocentric discourses, while postcolonial thought is necessary for discussions of the developing world and for reconfiguring the terms of environmental crisis in all circumstances. Applying the idea of border ecology to the highly emblematic site of the US-Mexico border is an intriguing possibility, one that finds resonance in the work of the indigenous art collective Postcommodity, as well as a 2011 video piece by artist Amar Kanwar set in the Indian state of Odisha. Both artworks engage the idea of non-Western and nonhuman epistemologies, effectively erasing traditional hierarchies and working to undo histories of human inequality.

Postcommodity’s Repellent Fence For their installation Repellent Fence/Vala Repelente (2015), Postcommodity reenvisioned the border between the United States and Mexico. This image is a provocative one: a line of yellow helium balloons, each 10 feet in diameter and tethered 100 feet above ground, cutting diagonally across the foreground and receding into a mountainous horizon. The balloons appear to hold their ground, marking a swath of territory for a new order, one indicated by the inscrutable symbols emblazoned in all directions. At once an eye and a target, the balloons, the artists write, are enlarged versions of an ineffective “scare eye” bird repellent, a product that “[c]oincidently … use[s] indigenous medicine colors and iconography – the same graphic used by indigenous peoples from South America to

Border art for a border ecology 121 Canada for thousands of years” (Postcommodity). Scanning deeper into the photograph, the viewer sees that Postcommodity’s Repellent Fence intersects another one, as the long line of yellow balloons straddles the US-Mexico border. At center left, the dark line of the border fence emerges briefly before ducking back behind a swell of the ground. From this vantage point, the balloon fence overpowers the international border line. The bright yellow orbs both overpower and supersede the authority of the wall. Unlike the border fence, the Repellent Fence is inherently open, for there is no barrier in the intervals between each tether. The use of balloons also sets the line in motion, for each can sway depending on the direction and intensity of the wind. Aesthetically, these two factors construct a border line that is both porous and vacillating, terms used by Etienne Balibar, among others, to describe the state of international divides in late twentieth-century Europe.1 The promise of a globalized world, one heralded by such efforts as the Schengen Agreement, the establishment of the Eurozone, and in North America, 1994’s NAFTA, was one of openness and access, signified by the rhetoric of the dissolution (or at least the permeability) of longstanding borders. It is no coincidence, then, that Repellent Fence offers up a line that fulfills these very conditions, intersecting with and potentially undermining the stability of the metal fence that lurks in the background. As a scholar of the borderlands, I am immediately drawn into a comparison with The Cloud, Alfredo Jaar’s performance/installation for the 2000–2001 version of the San Diego-Tijuana festival InSITE. A “cloud” comprised of over a thousand helium balloons, labeled with the names of the more than 3,000 undocumented immigrants who died making the desert crossing, hovered above the ground at Valle de los Muertos (Valley of the Dead). Not all of the undocumented had been identified, so many of the balloons were imprinted with “sin nombre,” an acknowledgment of this fact. During the performance, the cloud was opened, and the balloons, untethered, were carried south on the wind. The direction was unintended by the artist or the festival organizers, but it allowed for the symbolism of a return journey home.2 I have discussed this piece at length before, so I will instead focus on its resonances with Postcommodity’s Repellent Fence. The two pieces are formally similar, each an installation of balloons at the specific site of the border. Both Jaar’s performance and the Postcommodity installation comprise a spectacle, with each using its platform to advocate for those rendered invisible by the rhetoric surrounding the border. Yet Jaar’s memorial remains overdetermined by its subject matter, with little room for ambiguity or surprise. Because of its visual components, Postcommodity’s work draws attention to marginalized human voices in ways that prioritize objecthood and foreground discussions of the environment, encouraging a conceptualization of the borderlands as a shared space for human and nonhuman interests. Postcommodity staged this border art intervention between the cities of Douglas, Arizona, and Agua Prieta, Sonora. With the Repellent Fence, these two sister cities become stitched together through a fence made not of solid metal, but of air, a play on the popular conception of the border as an empty space or

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“no-man’s land.” Such rhetoric imagines the borderlands as previously unoccupied, a tabula rasa for US settler colonialism under the guise of Manifest Destiny. Repellent Fence works to undo the normalization of the border as a line dividing unclaimed territories. In particular, Douglas, Arizona, is home to the “Geronimo Surrenders” monument, a marker of the ongoing colonial project in the US Southwest. Such a monument inscribes the history of the region in terms of Anglo-American victories, rather than the dispossession of indigenous peoples. Such erased histories bring the viewer back to the symbols emblazoned on the bright yellow balloons. Those “scare-eye” targets are intended for home use, imitating the glaring eyes of predatory birds. Product images for a typical Amazon vendor show the “scare eyes” hanging in gardens and, in one crudely photoshopped image, poking out of a cornfield next to a denim-clad Anglo-American farmer. The idea of a “repellent fence,” then, raises questions as to who, or what, is being repelled. As such, the work is propositional in nature, perhaps instituting a novel form of border enforcement. The decades-long militarization of the border finds its resolution, even its logical extreme, in the decoy eyes protecting this stretch of land. Yet Postcommodity, in descriptions of the work, refers to the bird repellent as “ineffective.” This assessment is the opinion of one of the artists who had apparently purchased the product for personal use, only to see the birds return after a few days (Montiel). In its appropriation of the product symbols, then, Repellent Fence offers a critique of the entire militarized US-Mexico border apparatus. Postcommodity reveals the theatrical nature of border security to be pure artifice, a show of force rather than an indication of true strength. Delving further into the “scare-eye” symbolism, the collective notes that the commercially available product makes use of indigenous medicinal colors and appropriates the form of the oblong “eye,” a symbol shared throughout North and South American indigenous communities. Rather than homing in on a specific region, culture, or tribe, Postcommodity describes the balloons as an “indigenous semiotic system” that emphasizes “interconnectedness” (Montiel). Taking into account this more complete history of the “scare eye,” it becomes impossible to separate the Western from the non-Western, the United States from Mexico, and the human from the nonhuman. Birds, indigenous medicine, and repellent balloons all meet at the border fence, while migrants, border patrol officers, and border dwellers alike find varying representation in its deceptively simple symbolism. That interconnectedness emphasized by the artists undergirds not only the political activism inherent to the border discourse but also the modern environmental movement. It is at this juncture that I wish to place Repellent Fence and consider the specific overlaps between border art and ecological thinking. In this vein, it helps to consider that Repellent Fence is a work of Land Art as well as a border installation. Remove the border fence, and the piece evokes comparisons to the canonical desert earthworks: the vertical spikes of Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field (1977), and the strict linearity of Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969), just to name two pertinent examples.3 Land Art in itself was a genre that concerned itself with boundaries and their transgression, rerouting the established power hierarchies and spatial circuits of the art world in favor

Border art for a border ecology 123 of those places seen at the time as marginal (New Jersey, the Great Salt Lake, the Nevada desert, Marfa). In this sense, then, Postcommodity’s Repellent Fence can be construed as an extension of this 60s and 70s obsession with scale, sitedness, and movement. It is important to note, however, that the border installation was a temporary one, not intended to carve a lasting mark on the earth, as with Heizer’s Double Negative. In this sense, Postcommodity’s work is far more ecologically minded than those earlier land-based interventions. The most significant point of departure from the genre, however, is that categorizing Repellent Fence as Land Art privileges the work’s formal qualities at the expense of what it says about local knowledge. After all, ignoring the shifting territorial claims of the land beneath those yellow helium balloons enacts yet another erasure of indigenous histories. The attention paid to indigenous histories, as well as the nod to nonhuman concerns through the use of the “scare-eye,” hints at the much broader panoply of interests present at this highly charged site. If we as humans conceive of the border as simply a line drawn on the map, a political distinction that has grown to encompass an increasingly militarized security apparatus, this places it within a purely anthropocentric framework. Such an argument voids the notion of borderas-habitat, in some areas a watershed, an estuary at its ends, with large swaths of desert in between. A “big, beautiful” border wall not only separates longstanding human communities, but also divides ecological niches. “Border,” then, is a touchpoint of what physicist and gender theorist Karen Barad terms “entanglement” – both discursively and materially constituted.4 In short, Repellent Fence is a work of border art that operates as what I term a border ecology.

Border ecology Although border ecology aims to be more than the sum of its parts, it helps to break them down and clarify how I intend their use. “Ecology” is defined as the study of the interaction between an organism and its environment. That interaction can take into account many actors: organic and inorganic (or some combination thereof), biotic and abiotic, human and nonhuman alike. With the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 and the birth of modern environmentalism in the West, ecology began to be conceived across disciplines as a mode of thinking as well as an area of study. My use of the term ecology is aligned with this turn toward “ecological thought”; aware of the interconnectedness of life on Earth, but reliant upon selective interactions and chains of events. Borders are associated with interconnection, but also as points of difference. The term can refer to the boundary between two or more spaces, modes of being, belief systems, or other categories. Ecologically, the borders between biological communities are known as an ecotone, a space of transition that shifts with broader changes in climate. But borders are also gaps, blind spots, edges, and sites of marginality. I suggest conceiving of a given border line as a thickened space, with its own dimensions and materiality, and exerting tremendous influence on the production of art and visual culture. The center, here generalized, conceives of it as a liminal zone, the wild periphery, far from the grasp of the law, operating

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according to their own internal logic. In the logic of any given center, then, borders require maintenance, patrol, walls, and fences: a militarized guard. The border or borderlands, in this larger, looser definition, is traditionally the object of study. In general, postcolonial theory prioritizes the knowing nature of the object of study – particularly local and indigenous knowledge. Walter Mignolo’s aligned term “border thinking” describes an epistemological reversal.5 The “border,” an entity that is typically thought, must now be conceived of as active and itself thinking. The relevance of this theory for my formulation of a border ecology rests on the idea that eco-art is a border genre. It is far outside the “mainstream” of contemporary art, and its lineage is that of the periphery, the transgressors, and alternative modes of art-making. Furthermore, border thinking, as I am presenting here, is at its core an opportunity to rethink preexisting power relations, those that drive the continued ecological crisis. In a 2014 interview with Tony Fry and Eleni Kalantidou, Mignolo elaborated on his earlier theorization, stating that [w]e, the anthropos [the other], we dwell in borders with full awareness of the power differential “between” the two sides of the border, the side of the humanitas and the side of the anthropos. Border epistemology emerges from the experience, and the anger, of entanglement, border dwelling in a power differential. Briefly, border thinking requires a shift in the geography of reasoning, a geopolitical conception of knowing, understanding, and believing, a delinking from the assumption of modern and postmodern epistemology, hermeneutics and sensibility. (174) Here, Mignolo underscores the relationship between border thinking and disempowerment, as well as the massive geographical shift this mode of inquiry entails. Although border thinking erases the subject/object distinction, it depends on a continued imbalance, an osmotic flow of power and ideas, to generate its critical heft. In applying these ideas to the US-Mexico border art, a strange thing happens: the border becomes a truly generative site, one that, in its very thickness, creates a space for alternate modes of thinking, for a dismantling of power structures. Suddenly, it is the center that is hopelessly out of touch. The border has its own codes of behavior and signs of belonging, and it gives rise to new ways of conceptualizing that which lies beyond itself. Mignolo’s metaphor is not concerned with the nonhuman factors that shaped the history of colonialism and postcolonialism. In this sense, the preexisting power dynamic between human and nonhuman actors remains firmly in place. What is lost is a full accounting of the agency of the border itself, beyond just its human inhabitants or its culture. Images of the border give a sense of its material: the stuff that comprises it, the metal of its fences, the desert sand, river currents, and mountain ranges that contribute to the experience of its crossing. In the case of the US-Mexico border, the climate of the Sonoran desert, the polluted waterways of Baja California, and the urban fences shape the political realities of

Border art for a border ecology 125 migration as well as the cultural and media forms that emerge from the region. Such an expanded conception of the border takes into account its composition as a conglomeration of humans, animals, and other living things. This activated border acquires agency not only through the actions of governmental entities, surveyors, and cartographers who establish and draw the line, but also through climatological and topographical factors. The desert crossings from Mexico to the United States are driven by economic factors and personal safety, but they are propelled by thirst, extreme heat, and the unforgiving terrain. I believe the overlapping points between the animist rhetoric of border thinking that I am employing here and the nonhuman turn of new materialism have a tremendous potential to generate new understandings of politically motivated eco-art. Postcolonial sensitivity tempers the radical decentering of new materialist thought, an acknowledgment that human histories of inequality and structural imbalance do, in fact, matter, and have lasting effects on the object-driven landscape presented in the images. Consideration of the nonhuman, on the other hand, gives another dimension to border thinking, expanding its reach beyond that of the human border subject, or Mignolo’s anthropos. Instead, this combined approach encompasses a rich spectrum of border dwellers. A border ecology, then, finds these new connections to make – not just between humans and nonhumans, and objects and things, but also between different modes of thinking about these objects. Because border ecology is constituted by art from the margins, and privileges the gaps, disjunctures, and interstitial spaces within a given piece, it changes the terms of the conversation. To return to Postcommodity’s installation, it becomes clear that the work brings these kinds of ecological and nonhuman considerations to the political urgency of the border. The allusion to the bird repellent, the dialogue with the formal aspects of Land Art, and the insistence upon the significance of indigenous presence in the borderlands all work to create a portrait of the border as a site in which every position is marginal, with no single viewpoint privileged above the others. Bisecting the line, the Repellent Fence works to de-hierarchize a deeply overdetermined and securitized space. Such an intervention hints at the political potential of border art within a border ecology. While Postcommodity’s intervention serves as a prime example of this theory, I wish to consider briefly the work of two borderland’s photographers as also constitutive of a border ecology. Daniel Leivick’s 2011 portfolio of panoramas at the Ajo Transect, located south of Phoenix, Arizona, and adjacent to the Tohono O’Odham Nation Reservation, presents an intriguing pairing with the Repellent Fence.6 One photograph, Border Patrol and Cave Dwellings, de-centers the eponymous government agents, locating them within a vast and ancient landscape. A single road transects a desert valley, receding into the distance and engulfed by its surroundings. Hills flank each side of the composition, and a distant mountain range can be seen in the background. Human presence cannot be easily identified, other than the clues given in the title. The equal weighting of the border patrol with the cave dwellings serves to remind the viewer that human presence in this desert landscape takes multiple forms, and that, as

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with the Repellent Fence, there is no single position of privilege from which to operate. Susan Harbage Page operates in a manner that diverges from Leivick’s grand panoramas, but her attention to intersections of human and nonhuman at the border helps to broaden this concept of border art for a border ecology.7 Harbage Page photographs personal objects – a comb, an eyeshadow compact, a twisted gray sweatshirt – discarded by border crossers. These photographs in situ locate these effects as evidence of their owners’ presence, testaments to the arduous nature of the journey and evidence of shared humanity. More intriguing, however, is the second life of these objects, for Harbage Page removes them from their site, brings them to her North Carolina studio, and documents them as part of an ongoing “anti-archive.” Devoid of context, a red bra lies on a white background under studio lighting, the grime caking its fabric seemingly incongruous in the setting. Each object brims with an inner life and narrative of its own. In the move from site to “non-site” (to paraphrase the land artist Robert Smithson), these objects become absorbed into the US interior, completing the border crossing that their owners may or may not have been able to finish. The series plays on the shifting identifications of these objects as belongings, trash, and art object, and their status is never fully settled.

The Scene of Crime I discuss these series to hint at the richness of the discourse that border ecology can generate when applied to the US-Mexico border region and its political framework. Yet border ecology also exhibits tremendous potential to engage in the kind of South-South interactions that bypass traditional knowledge hierarchies and circuits of power. By placing these US-Mexico border site-specific works in dialogue with Amar Kanwar’s intervention in Odisha, India, I hope to draw connections centered on the question of indigenous land rights and visualizations of a border ecology. Kanwar’s 2011 film The Scene of Crime is the focal point of his multimedia Sovereign Forest installation (2012).8 Exhibited temporarily at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, the piece has a simultaneous permanent installation in Bhubaneswar, Odisha, hosted by the Samadrusti Media activist group. The 43-minute video juxtaposes scenes of the landscape in India’s eastern state of Odisha with textual and sonic overlays, conveying a sense of precarity, an ecosystem on the edge. The pacing is slow, lingering on images mostly devoid of people. As with much of Kanwar’s work, there is no narrative to be gleaned from the images and no authoritative voice to interpret them. Instead, each visual is in dialogue with the others, set against the text and submerged in an ambient soundscape. The objects depicted are connected through the mechanism of video and their shared precarity. The biopolitical ramifications of the conflict in Odisha extend not just to the humans dwelling within the forest, but its inhabitants at all levels. The Scene of Crime visualizes the ever-shifting boundaries between the legal system, the material world, and those entities (human and nonhuman alike) seeking representation.

Border art for a border ecology 127 The Scene of Crime is the stage set for crimes both past and future. The film’s introductory titles establish the stakes, informing the viewer of the contested nature of this landscape. Each location, Kanwar advises, is on the brink of destruction, along with its human and nonhuman inhabitants. In the 1990s, the state government laid the groundwork for the extraction of iron ore and bauxite reserves, setting up 600 mine lease areas (28).9 One such mining corporation, the UK-based Vedanta, was the target of widespread protests in the early twentyfirst century. The Odisha natives decried what they saw as a recolonization of their territory, fueled by international capital. In 2010, the Supreme Court of India handed down a ruling that resulted in the repeal of clearance for the mine (44).10 Protestors continually work to keep out Vedanta, for in 2015, Narendra Modi’s BJP-led government passed an ordinance meant to make corporate land acquisition easier (47–48).11 With a focus on objects, Kanwar’s film initially appears to adhere to the logic of new materialism. Kanwar organizes The Scene of Crime into ten “maps” of varying lengths. Though not maps in the cartographic sense, these vignettes do chart a mental landscape, a dreamlike terrain. The use of “map” to organize the film also implies navigation, a sense of motion, and an intentionality to this movement. Kanwar leads the viewer on a journey with only these visual and auditory maps as clues. These maps generate connections, an approach that is at the core of Kanwar’s larger project. In an interview with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, Kanwar discussed the strange dialogue that happens between the different parts of the exhibition, and ultimately the different scenes of the film: “The moment you start actually relating and seeing inner narratives between and within what is around you, a different kind of memory emerges, a different kind of movement occurs in the mind.”12 The objects depicted are connected through the mechanism of video and their shared precarity. In Kanwar’s film, they speak a private language to each other, indiscernible to human viewers. The exploitation of Odisha’s resources, Kanwar’s film argues, will erase the kind of multifarious nonhuman epistemologies that comprise such a landscape. The imagery that populates the film supports these conclusions. Tall grasses sway in the wind, silhouetted against an overexposed bleached-out sky. They move to the sound of water, of waves lapping on some unexplored shore. Closeups of the grasses throughout the film give a sense of a world in perpetual motion, alive with possibility and independent of the actions of corporate interests, states, and other entities. The camera focuses on another plant: a ripe berry, a spiked stem – hinting at a landscape in peril, but with a means to defend itself. Other scenes focus on a flowing river, industrial structures at night, cows making their way across a desert, a man on a bicycle seen through tall grasses. Such a disjunctive assortment of images falls on the ontographic technique of the list to draw connections and order them. Humans, animals, plants, and other nonhumans populate a world devoid of smooth transitions, an incomplete system that accounts for the separateness of each object but allows for their influence on each other. In building this visual panoply, however, Kanwar’s film reveals itself as more than an exercise in new materialist thought and object-oriented ontologies. The

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images are overlaid with text that tells a parallel story, one that weaves with the images, often undermining or realigning them. The text re-encodes human power dynamics into the landscape – juxtaposed with the images, then, we see how Kanwar accounts for other knowledge – indigenous, nonhuman, and subaltern, within the standard narrative of land rights activism in Odisha. The titles allude to a disappearance, a presumed murder and an unnamed woman left behind to grieve. One phrase, “she sees him in everything,” gives the viewer a clue as to how to read the landscape imagery. It is both an establishment of the scene of crime as well as the search for what has been lost. Nineteen minutes into The Scene of Crime, Kanwar gives the viewer a sense of the “crime” under consideration: switching from his static camera to archival footage of men running with guns, frantically shouting. The camera shakes violently, as it captures a scene of protest and police action from behind foliage. This vantage point echoes earlier moments in the film in which the camera surveys a scene through grasses, palm fronds, or other plants. The archival footage ends, and the rhythm of the earlier scenes resumes. The camera focuses on a memorial marker, and then moves on to industrial structures, including a mine lit up in the darkness. The text then turns to intimations of violence and the larger conflict at hand: “He told her, we have a sound bomb/that would make a noise just to scare, without causing injury/she told him about the police and a Rapid Acquisition Force/ that would acquire the land within a day.” The final 6 minutes of the film build up to an extended shot of a picturesque tree framed against a wispy sky. A sea of velvet grasses lines the lower portion of the frame, “they talked about him for many months/and so began preparations for the trial/The Sovereign Forest vs. The Union of India.” A slow fade out begins, and then an abrupt cut to black. This final text orients the viewer to the nature of the conflict that has, to this point in the video, only been referenced obliquely. Odisha is, by all metrics, at the margins of Indian politics and economic policy, one of the poorest states in the country (Macdonald et al., 45). Kanwar’s visuals, then, give viewers a glimpse of the margins of the margin – a double marginal status. The protests against Vedanta briefly cast the state and its tribal inhabitants into the national discourse. Prior to the agitation, Vedanta had acquired the homes and lands of 118 people, as well as the agricultural lands of another 1,220; if permitted, further mining would go on to destroy sacred tribal sites.13 With the invocation of the upcoming “trial,” The Scene of Crime invokes the court cases that decided the forest’s fate. The interplay of image and text gives the film its rhetorical heft and a direction for its critique. The violence enacted upon the landscape is also directed at its inhabitants. It is an outgrowth of the destructive force of colonialism “built into this founding moment …. It transposed political demands onto a time axis that forced the indigenous population to inhabit life-worlds that have never been theirs, while at the same time preventing them from fully making them their own.”14 Not solely a visual poem of interconnected imagery that hints at a landscape on the brink of destruction, The Scene of Crime serves as a testimony, hinting at the richness of these life-worlds – entanglements of human and nonhuman alike – that have been lost to the demands of a rapidly modernizing state.

Border art for a border ecology 129 In being forced to inhabit such different life-worlds, the tribal inhabitants of the forest undergo a process of de- and reclassification. In India, their status is alternately referred to as “scheduled,” legally marking their existence as disadvantaged. At the same time, preservationist rhetoric permeates the committee report about the land’s status. To return to the Postcommodity installation on the US-Mexico border, the 1848 dividing line enacts a similar reclassification, separating the inhabitants of the contested territory into US and Mexican citizens, with no regard for family ties, tribal status, or language. Each of these artworks – the border installation, the panoramic photographs, and Kanwar’s film – hints at how the state’s desire to classify its citizens into distinct categories fails on every level. Tribal lands evade binary distinctions, not falling into either “culture” or “nature,” but occupying both realms simultaneously. This slippage applies to the occupants of these lands and has material effects on their legal rights. This chapter has considered what happens when artists and art historians stop thinking in terms of “border art” and instead reorient toward a “border ecology.” Bringing the human and nonhuman into exchange with each other serves to destabilize traditional hierarchies and recognize the importance of non-Western epistemologies to analyze highly contested sites. The lens of ecology, and the modes of thinking this entails, encourages consideration of the role of nonhumans – be they inflatable balloons, predatory birds, discarded combs, or the landscape itself – as equal interests in the conversation. At the same time, histories of human inequality remain encoded in these locations, and as such must overlay any attempts to fully de-hierarchize the land.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Balibar, 217. See Sheren, pp. 90–113, for more on The Cloud. For more on Land Art and its relationship to ecological thought, see Nisbet. Barad, 39–70. Mignolo’s explanation of “border thinking” can be found in Mignolo, 9–10. Leivick’s portfolio can be accessed at https://danielleivick.com/portfolios/ajo-tran sect. Harbage Page’s series Objects in the Landscape and the Anti-Archive can be accessed at https://susanharbagepage.com/u-s-mexico-border-project/. Although Kanwar’s film is not available online, a video walkthrough of the Sovereign Forest installation at Yorkshire Sculpture Park can be found at https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=0SchgxoejKc. Zyman, 28. Macdonald et al., 44. Macdonald et al., 47–48. Modi’s stance on the environment is a complex one, as his government has also undertaken significant measures to combat pollution. At the same time, the BJP remains firmly on the side of corporate interests. Obrist and Kanwar, 68. Macdonald et al., 46. Halkort, 63.

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Works cited Balibar, Etienne. “The Borders of Europe.” Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, edited by Peng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, University of Minnesota Press, 1998, 216–231. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press, 2007. Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. Mariner Books, 2002. Fry, Tony, et al. “An Exchange: Questions from Tony Fry and Eleni Kalantidou and Answers from Walter Mignolo.” Design in the Borderlands, edited by Eleni Kalantidou and Tony Fry, Routledge, 2014, 173–188. Halkort, Monika. “Expressive Sovereignty.” Amar Kanwar -- The Sovereign Forest, edited by Daniela Zyman, Sternberg Press, 2015, 59–64. Macdonald, Kate, et al. “Demanding Rights in Company-Community Resource Extraction Conflicts: Examining the Cases of Vedanta and POSCO in Odisha, India.” Demanding Justice in the Global South: Claiming Rights, edited by Jean Grugel, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, 43–67. Mignolo, Walter D. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton University Press, 2000. Montiel, Anya. “Mending the Border: The Indigenous Eye of Postcommodity.” NMAI Magazine, 2017, www.americanindianmagazine.org/story/mending-border-indigenous -eye-postcommodity. Nisbet, James. Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems in Art of the 1960s and 1970s. MIT Press, 2014. Obrist, Hans Ulrich, and Amar Kanwar. “Arhcipelic Thinking -- Amar Kanwar in Conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist.” Amar Kanwar -- The Sovereign Forest, edited by Daniela Zyman, Sternberg Press, 2015, 65–84. Postcommodity, “Repellent Fence −2015.” postcommodity.com/Repellent_Fence_Englis h.html. Sheren, Ila N. Portable Borders: Performance Art and Politics on the U.S. Frontera since 1984. University of Texas Press, 2015. Zyman, Daniela. “Undermining Sovereignty: Three Emergences Within Amar Kanwar’s The Sovereign Forest.” Amar Kanwar -- The Sovereign Forest, edited by Daniela Zyman, Sternberg Press, 2015, 27–32.

10 States of exile Kracauer’s extraterritoriality, and the poetics of memory in Cristina Peri Rossi’s Estado de exilio (2003) Ignacio Infante In one of the sections of her brief but fascinating autobiographical work Julio Cortázar y Cris, the Uruguayan writer, based in Barcelona since the 1970s, Cristina Peri Rossi (Montevideo, 1941) poignantly describes a particular experience of temporality in relation to the process of writing that highlights a sense of feeling “strange” in the world. The specific passage of this book – a work originally written in Barcelona and published in Uruguay in 2014 – in which Peri Rossi articulates this feeling of strangeness, is part of the section entitled “Los exilios” [The exiles], and goes as follows: A medida que voy escribiendo este libro, que no pensaba escribir nunca, siento que el tiempo real es el pasado, el tiempo inmediato es el pasado, y cuando paro a descansar un poco … me siento extraña. (Julio Cortázar y Cris, “Los exilios,” 42) [As a I am writing this book, a book I had never planned to write, I feel that the real time is the past, the immediate time is the past, and when I stop to rest for a while … I feel strange.]1 This sentence, marked by a deep lyrical sense of nostalgia, expresses how the subjective experience of a complex form of temporality is for Peri Rossi not only connected to the act and process of writing, but also to the historical experience of exile, as made clear by the title of this particular section of Julio Cortázar y Cris. This experience of “real time” as a temporality always pertaining to the past is precisely connected to the larger question of memory, or rather what I will refer to in this chapter as the poetics of memory, that for Peri Rossi gravitates around the process of writing. According to Peri Rossi, “real time” appears to constitute an experience of the past as immediate, and thus an experience of the immediate as a spatiotemporal “here and now” that is ultimately felt as a realm already past, gone, lost, and never recoverable, except for – and this is perhaps the key aspect here – through the very process of writing. Thus, feeling “real time” for Peri Rossi is a strange but familiar experience, in other words, an intrinsically uncanny experience – “me siento extraña,” as she describes – a strange feeling in which the

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here and now is acknowledged by Peri Rossi as never escaping the past, and ultimately, as I will argue in what follows, as never leaving the experience of exile. This chapter explores Sigfried Kracauer’s concept of extraterritoriality in relation to the poetic work of Peri Rossi, within the larger critical framework proposed by Fronteras Líquidas / Liquid Borders as a collection of essays. The main premise of this chapter is to highlight a series of connections between the critical examination of exile as a historical condition originally developed by Kracauer in the 1960s and the specific features of Peri Rossi’s creative exploration of exile in her poetry collection Estado de exilio (2003). Through my analysis, I demonstrate how their respective understandings of exile as a historical condition constitute crucial and parallel acts of resistance to the hegemonic and brutally violent flattening logic of totalitarianism divergently experienced by Kracauer during Nazi Germany, and by Peri Rossi during the military dictatorship in Uruguay, and their respective historical aftermaths. Within this larger historical context, the chapter aims to establish two main claims as part of the critical premises presented by Fronteras Líquidas / Liquid Borders as a collective critical inquiry: first, to highlight the extreme importance of both critical theory and creative practices as political acts of resistance in relation to specific historical circumstances related to exile; and second, to provide a wider historical and poetic lens through which to understand and rethink the present historical moment, in order to challenge contemporary forms of totalitarian ideologies, and the parallel hegemonic and brutally violent flattening logic related to forms of totalitarianism developed in the twentieth century. At the core of both Kracauer’s development of the notion of extraterritoriality and Peri Rossi’s poetics of exile in Estado de exilio, there is a parallel preoccupation with time and space – or rather, with the forms and conditions of experience as affected by the spatiotemporal and affective dimensions of exile as a historical condition. As I will show in the rest of this chapter, there is a relevant historical overlap, and paradoxical reversal, in the work of these two very different leftwing intellectuals – a German film theorist from Frankfurt, almost at the end of his life, on the one hand, and a young Uruguayan writer from Montevideo in her early 30s, on the other. Both writers are not only producing their work while in exile having had to escape the brutal totalitarian regimes and fascist ideologies in their respective countries of origin, but more importantly, deeply reflecting on the historical conditions and affective state of exile in extremely relevant parallel ways.

Kracauer’s extraterritoriality and Peri Rossi’s Estado de exilio (2003) Sigfried Kracauer (Frankfurt, 1889–New York, 1966), generally known for his influential work Theory of Film (1960), was film critic and literary editor for the Frankfurter Zeitung between 1922 and 1933. Kracauer was a leading public intellectual in Frankfurt at the time, and he was associated with various key figures of the Frankfurt School, such as Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin while living

States of exile 133 in Germany. Kracauer had to escape Nazi Germany in 1933, living in exile for the rest of his life – first in France and then escaping to the United States in 1941, where he lived until the end of his life in 1966. As part of his critical approach to cultural and aesthetic production, Kracauer specifically developed the notion of extraterritoriality in his exploration of the concepts of history and historiography published in his later work History, The Last Things Before the Last. Kracauer’s History was published posthumously in 1969, in fact, just a few years before Cristina Peri Rossi – having lost her university position and Chair in comparative literature in Uruguay in 1972 – left her home country to live in exile in Barcelona, where she composed the poems that configure her collection Estado de exilio. While Peri Rossi’s poetry collection was first published in 2003 by Visor Libros, as the winner of the 18th Rafael Alberti Poetry Prize in Spain, it was a work mostly composed 30 years earlier during 1973 after her arrival in Barcelona from Uruguay. Soon after its publication in Spain in 2003, Estado de exilio was translated by Marylin Buck as State of Exile and published in Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s prestigious San Francisco-based press City Lights in 2008, a publication and translation that has gradually led to the growing recognition of Peri Rossi’s poetry across the Anglo-American literary market in recent years. As Peri Rossi describes in the introduction to Estado de exilio, most of the poems in this collection were written during the period of right-wing military dictatorships in the Southern Cone, when hundreds of thousands of Argentines, Uruguayans, and Chilean had to escape to and live in Europe, the United States, and Canada in order to save their lives during the 1970s2: La mayoría de los poemas que componen ESTADO DE EXILIO fueron escritos en los años amargos de las dictaduras latinoamericanas, cuando las calles y los albergues de París, Londres, Barcelona, Madrid, Estocolmo y Ontario estaba repletos de argentinos, uruguayos y chilenos que habían salvado el pellejo “en el anca de un piojo,” genial metáfora que le escuché una vez a un maduro marinero uruguayo, convertido, por azares de la emigración, en pizzero de un restaurante de la Avenida Infanta Carlota, Barcelona. Fue el primer libro que escribí en el exilio, y sin embargo, no intenté publicarlo. Un extraño pudor me lo impidió. No es fácil llorar en las calles de las ciudades adoptivas, y no quería contribuir al dolor colectivo, al desgarramiento solitario. (Peri Rossi, Estado de exilio, 8) [Most of the poems that configure STATE OF EXILE were written in the bitter years of the Latin American dictatorships, when the streets and shelters of Paris, London, Barcelona, Madrid, Stockholm and Ontario were full of Argentines, Uruguayans and Chileans who had saved their skin just barely [“en el anca de un piojo”] great metaphor that I once heard an older Uruguayan sailor, turned, by the chance of emigration, into a pizza maker in a restaurant on Avenida Infanta Carlota, in Barcelona. It was the first book that I wrote in exile, and I didn't try to publish it then. A strange modesty

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Ignacio Infante prevented me. It is never easy to cry on the streets of adoptive cities, and I didn’t want to contribute to our collective pain, or to private harrowings.]

In this context, one of the key dimensions of Peri Rossi’s recognition of the own affective implications of her own writing, which can perhaps be defined as a lyric combination of sadness and nostalgia that is both deeply personal and collective at the same time (“contribute to our collective pain, or to private harrowings”), is that it constitutes a form of affect intrinsically related to the experience of exile. From this perspective, Peri Rossi’s crucial recognition and acknowledgment of the strangeness of the past as a most immediate feeling articulated through the act of writing appears to be central to her poetry collection Estado de exilio. This particular poetry collection, the first collection that Peri Rossi wrote in exile having just arrived in Spain, is inherently related for the Uruguayan author to a parallel sense of “strange feeling” to the one that she describes through the recognition of the temporality of “real time” in the section from Julio Cortázar y Cris just mentioned. In both instances, the experience of time is inherently connected by Peri Rossi to the process of writing, and consequently, to the very form of her texts – the rhythm, cadence, figuration, and tone of her lyrical language – as well as to the very materiality of her words printed on the page. It is thus through an examination of the very form, that is, the actual poetics of Peri Rossi’s writing, that one can further explore the theoretical implications stemming from her literary representation of the temporality of “real time.” A relevant example in this context is provided by Peri Rossi’s poem “Estado de Exilio” that titles her collection: ESTADO DE EXILIO muy pronto tan lejos bastante mal siempre dificultad palabras furiosa largo extraño extranjero que más el árbol solo miro diferente todo

fuera más humano (Estado de exilio, 29)

[STATE OF EXILE very soon so far away quite badly always difficulty words furious interminable strange a stranger what else the tree if I just look differently everything could be more human (State of Exile, 27)]

States of exile 135 As this poem shows, the condition or state of exile is primarily constituted here through language as a fluid form of linguistic strangeness, particularly in the way in which the linguistic units of Peri Rossi’s poem are configured materially, semantically, and temporally in relation to each other. Here, the deep sense of alienation, dislocation, and loss in this poem is articulated by the gradual juxtaposition of the poem’s linguistic structures through which Peri Rossi overlaps in the first two lines a series of modified adverbs (temporal, “muy pronto”; spatial “tan lejos”; modal “bastante mal”; and back to temporal “siempre”) that are followed by a verse composed of nouns and adjectives (“dificultad palabras furiosa largo”). This sequence generates a fluid semantic flow of meaning through a series of more concrete “difficulty” of “words” – described as hard, furious, and long – that end up grounded on the overall sense of strangeness specifically invoked in the fourth verse: “extraño extranjero que más el árbol.” This central focus on the poetic figure of “strange a stranger,” as translated into English by Marylin Buck, grounds overall the uncanny feeling of Peri Rossi’s “real time” within the poem, as a sense of strange temporality that is highlighted in the concluding clause configured by the last three verses of the poem: “solo miro diferente / todo / fuera más humano.” While Buck translates these lines as the conditional clause “if I just look differently / everything / could be more human,” the fact is that the semantic implications of these three lines in the original poem create a complex series of semantic and temporal implications that transcend a particular and concrete meaning. From this perspective, the lines “solo miro diferente / todo / fuera más humano” highlight a fluid and strange form of looking beyond the self as represented through language – as in differently looking at everything beyond the self, or a looking alone at others, or looking outside to others, or even looking differently to an outside that could be more human, among other possible translations, or potential interpretations of the original verses – which lead overall to a palimpsest of feelings and experiences of time that lie at the core of the notion of Peri Rossi’s “state of exile.” Overall, Peri Rossi’s conceptualization of temporality in relation to exile appears to be extremely close – in structural, historical, and poetic terms – to Kracauer’s theorization of “extraterritoriality” in History. In general terms, Kracauer’s notion of “extraterritoriality” constitutes a spatiotemporal realm able to contain two different states of mind, in fact, as a palimpsest of temporalities connected to an experience of rootlessness. Kracauer originally figured the notion of extraterritoriality as a notion that the German critic specifically connects to the experience of exile as a historical condition, and which conceptualized formally in relation to the form of “objectivity” that he saw represented by Marcel Proust in the modernist novel Remembrance of Things Past: In that passage of his novel where he relates the neutral objectivity of photographs to the photographer’s emotional detachment, Proust lucidly describes two different states of mind – one in which a person’s self wields full power, and the other in which it has withdrawn from the scene. … Sometimes life itself produces such palimpsests. I am thinking of the exile who as an adult

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Ignacio Infante person has been forced to leave his country or has left it of his own free will. As the exile settles elsewhere, all those loyalties, expectations, and aspirations that comprise so large a part of the exile’s being are automatically cut off from their roots. … Where then does the exile live? In the near-vacuum of extra-territoriality…. The exile’s true mode of existence is that of a stranger. (History, 82-84)

By conceiving extraterritoriality as a “near-vacuum” realm where the “exile” lives, Kracauer is emphasizing both a figurative and a historical dimension of experience that, within his analysis, appear to be central to the critical understanding of each other. In other words, it is through the palimpsest of temporalities that he formally sees as figured in Proust fiction – thus having a figural dimension – that Kracauer is able to trace a parallel palimpsest back to the analogous structure of the life of the exile as a historical condition (“Sometimes life itself produces such palimpsests”). From this perspective, Kracauer’s conceptualization of “extraterritoriality” appears as an experience of temporality that in its articulation through language reflects a parallel historical structure in the world. Ultimately, at the core of Kracauer’s definition of extraterritoriality, there is a sense of strangeness that is strikingly parallel to the sense of strangeness (“strange a stranger”) that also appears as central to Peri Rossi’s poetic project in Estado de exilio. In this sense, another key example of the poetics of memory as a palimpsest of temporalities is provided by Peri Rossi’s poem, GEOGRAFÍA II, which is characterized by a stronger narrative coherence than the poem “Estado de exilio.” Here, the poetic voice establishes a temporal tension between two cities, as representing two different realms of experience, namely, the city of birth, on the one hand, represented as a space experienced as a child through streetcars and recognizable urban elements, and, on the other hand, the new city, characterized by an adult and isolated sense of clinical emptiness: En la nueva ciudad espero en el andén. Iluminado y vacío Parece una sala de hospital: jeringuillas algodones esputos (Estado de exilio, 63) [In this new city I wait on the metro platform. Illuminated and empty it seems like a hospital waiting room: syringes cotton balls spit (State of Exile, 115)

States of exile 137 These two urban spaces – the space of the home country in contrast to the “illuminated and empty” space of the new city in which the poetic voice is now waiting surrounded by a clinical sense of alienation – are connected by the last stanza of the poem, a third space, in this case, represented by an Edward Hopper painting, through which the poem provides a strange sequence of temporalities: Como en un cuadro nocturno de Hopper una muchacha solitaria espera junto a un pilar. (Estado de exilio, 63) [Like in one of Hopper’s nocturnal paintings a solitary girl waiting next to a pillar. (State of Exile, 115) This poem is a wonderful illustration of the poetic geography of “extraterritoriality” in Peri Rossi’s poetry of exile: a palimpsest of temporalities that is sustained by the rootlessness at the core of a scene that is at the same time past, present, and virtual or aesthetic versions of each other. It is the image of the “solitary girl” in “Hopper’s nocturnal paintings” that provides the emotional connection and figurative link between the temporality of childhood and the past city in the first stanza and the “new” temporality of adulthood in the new city of the second stanza. By establishing a connection between a past space, a new space, and the figural space of painting that literally frames them both my providing the analogy of feeling at the core of both previous stanzas, Peri Rossi’s poem creates a palimpsest of spaces, temporalities and experiences. Ultimately, it is through this poetic palimpsest that the subject, in this case, the poetic voice, can be present and absent at the same time, recurrently confronting its own strangeness, while expressing its own sense of alienation – a recurring sense of subjective rootlessness that can only exist as such through the process of writing – “me siento extraña,” as Peri Rossi described earlier. It is precisely in this sense of a deeply subjective strangeness, as a sense of detachment and disconnect from a geographical or spatial reality in the world, that Peri Rossi’s articulation of the experience of “real time” if her writing connects with another key dimension of Kracauer’s concept of “extraterritoriality.” For Kracauer, “extraterritoriality” entails a “cutting off of their roots” (History, 82) that leads to a strange sense of emotional detachment, that he specifically relates to a strange sense of objectivity in relation to historical experience. This is in part what Kracauer means when he describes “extraterritoriality” in the following statement: “The exile’s true mode of existence is that of a stranger” (History, 84). This sense of detachment and objectivity as central to a “true mode of existence” that Kracauer locates as central to the notion and experience of “extraterritoriality” is highlighted by Tara Forrest, through a close reading of key passages of Kracauer’s theorization of “extraterritoriality” in History, in the following terms:

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Ignacio Infante Like the exile (who, in confronting an “alien environment,” finds himself “cut off” from the expectations and assumptions which had previously “comprise[d] so large a part of his being”) Kracauer argues, in History, that “[i]t is only in this state of self-effacement, or homeless-ness that the historian can [effectively] commune with the material of his concern.” “A stranger to the world evoked by [his] sources,” he claims that the historian is “faced with the task – the exile’s task – of penetrating its outward appearances, so that he may learn to understand that world from within.” ( Forrest, 120)

The possibilities of extraterritoriality and the dialectics of exile Similar to Kracauer’s “extra-territorial” historian, the poetic voice of Peri Rossi’s writing emerges as a witness of the geography of exile as a palimpsest of temporalities that keep connecting the past with a deep sense of alienation in the present. However, as argued here, it is precisely because of this sense of alienation and rootlessness, which for Kracauer is central to the experience of exile, that he also conceives “extraterritoriality” as a possibility for a “true mode of existence” (History, 84). By embracing a condition through which the subject can go beyond the world’s “outward appearances,” Kracauer’s “extraterritoriality” articulates a way to “learn to understand that world from within” (History, 84). This condition or dimension of “extraterritoriality” is also described by Kracauer as the “exile’s task” – a notion which appears, from the perspective of critical theory, to be closely related as a concept to Walter Benjamin’s notion of the task of the translator in his extremely influential essay “The Translator’s Task.” There is, therefore, a sense in which, for Kracauer, “extraterritoriality,” primarily because of the palimpsest of temporalities upon which it is structured, as examined here, constitutes a realm of new epistemological – and perhaps also ontological – possibilities of experience through which the subject can transcend a given realm of reality. This is an aspect of Kracauer’s conception that is precisely emphasized by Gerhard Richter in his work Thought Images, as described here: For someone to exist in a state of extraterritoriality means to depart from territory as a space and as idea while still remaining deeply attached to it, that is attached to it precisely in the act of departing from it. Extraterritoriality names the experience of radical insecurity in which the self encounters itself as an other. But precisely this encounter also names the promise of possibility. (113) Thus, if within the framework of “extraterritoriality” explored in this chapter, the exile’s task constitutes a facing of the self as an other within a radical sense of epistemological and ontological “insecurity,” following both Richter and Kracauer here, it also constitutes a condition that paradoxically names the “promise of possibility” of a new linguistic and conceptual imagining of experience.

States of exile 139 From this perspective, the sense of strangeness that characterizes the poetics of memory in Peri Rossi’s writing also connects here with “the promise of possibility” (Richter, 113) at the core of Kracauer’s conception of “extraterritoriality” through which a new experience can be imagined and named. A parallel “promise of possibility” appears in the poem “CERCANÍAS,” the penultimate piece of the collection Estado de exilio, as a lyric expression of a new figuration of experience that Peri Rossi describes through the image of “mi ajenidad” [“my otherness”] (which is translated by Marilyn Buck as “foreignness”): CERCANÍAS No necesito ir muy lejos para soñar Un tren de cercanías me basta Unas vías herrumbrosas que corren al borde del mar y ya me siento en otro mundo […] Mi ajenidad – soy la extranjera, la de paso – es la ciudadania universal de los sueños. (Estado de exilio, 74) PROXIMITIES I don’t need to go very far to dream A train to the suburbs is enough for me Some rusted tracks that run along the seashore and I feel I’m already in another world […] My foreignness – I am the foreigner, the passing stranger – is the universal citizenship of dreams. (State of Exile, 143) As this poem shows, if the sense of otherness (“ajenidad”) expressed by the poetic voice is the result of a condition historically connected to the experience of exile (being “la extranjera, la de paso”), it also constitutes a possibility of poetically imagining a new, more complex and larger, understanding of the same sense of strangeness at the core of Peri Rossi’s experience of “real time” – the “universal citizenship of dreams” that ultimately emerges at the end of this poem. Using again Kracauer’s framework, one can argue that through the poetic voice in CERCANÍAS, Peri Rossi assumes the task of creating a new epistemological understanding of the world within her own practice as a writer.

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As shown in this chapter, while the various figurations of alterity articulated by Peri Rossi in her poetry can only exist as part of the poetics of memory articulated in her writing, by reading this collection in relation to the notion of “extraterritoriality” as theorized by Kracauer, we can better delineate some of the key critical, historical, and theoretical implications brought forth by Peri Rossi’s work. At the same time, and in the very process, reading Kracauer’s notion of “extraterritoriality” as a notion applicable to Peri Rossi’s poetics of memory sheds extremely valuable light on the affective and temporal dimensions of exile to which both writers are specifically and directly responding to in their parallel but paradoxically different works. In this sense, Peri Rossi’s poetics of memory and Kracauer’s notion of “extraterritoriality” both reflect the rupture of the coherence of a linear temporality as it is related to the historical experience of exile – what Sophia McClennen has called “exile’s time” in her influential work Dialectics of Exile. However, as my argument here has shown, Peri Rossi’s and Kracauer’s respective approaches to exile as a condition of experience – both poetic and historical, as argued here – open up new epistemological and ontological implications that considerably expand the dialectical model and reading of the temporality of exile developed by McClennen, while collapsing the distinctions between the spatial and temporal dimension of exile, which McClennen treats as specifically distinct from each other. While McClennen’s influential understanding of exile is based on a dialectical model of circular (premodern), linear (modern), and absent (postmodern) understanding of historical time (Dialectics of Exile, 28), the “extraterritorial” model proposed by Kracauer is based on an overlapping of temporalities in relation to each other. Simply put, in the realm of Kracauer’s “extraterritoriality” that relevantly mirrors Peri Rossi’s notion of “real time,” exile is a lot less dialectical, and considerably stranger and more fluid. Ultimately, in the realm of “extraterritoriality,” the ruptured coherence of McClennen’s “exile’s time” can be figuratively reconstructed not only into a deeper understanding of experience, as proposed by Kracauer, but also into the “promise of possibilities” mentioned by Richter, which, as shown here, are poignantly and powerfully imagined and shared by Peri Rossi through the pieces that configure her groundbreaking poetry collection Estado de exilio.

Notes 1 Unless otherwise noted, all translations in this chapter are of the author. 2 There are a series of extremely important studies of Uruguayan and Southern cone exile in the late twentieth century, among them Abril Trigo’s Memorias migrantes. Ensayos y testimonios sobre la diaspora uruguaya; and Exile, Diaspora, and Return: Changing Cultural Landscapes in Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay, edited by Luis Roniger, Leonardo Senkman, Saúl Sosnowski, and Mario Sznajder.

Works cited Benjamin, Walter. “The Translator’s Task,” translated by S. Rendall and Lawrence Venuti, ed., The Translation Studies Reader (third edition). London: Routledge, 2012, 75–83.

States of exile 141 Forrest, Tara. The Politics of Imagination. Benjamin, Kracauer, Kluge. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2007. Kracauer, Siegfried. History, the Last Things before the Last. New York: Oxford University Press, 1969. McClennen, Sophia A. The Dialectics of Exile: Nation, Time, Language, and Space in Hispanic Literatures. West Lafayettw: Purdue University Press, 2004. Peri Rossi, Cristina. Estado de Exilio. Madrid: Visor Libros, 2003. Peri Rossi, Cristina. Julio Cortázar y Cris. Montevideo: Estuario Editora, 2014. Peri Rossi, Cristina. State of Exile. Translated from the Spanish by Marilyn Buck. San Francisco: City Lights, 2008. Richter, Gerhard. Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers' Reflections from Damaged Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. Roniger, Luis, et al. Exile, Diaspora, and Return: Changing Cultural Landscapes in Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Trigo, Abril. Memorias Migrantes. Ensayos y testimonios sobre la diáspora uruguaya. Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2003.

Part IV

Colonial crossings/indigenous displacements

11 Early modern religious displacement and transnational Catholic subjects Stephanie Kirk

This chapter focuses on the experience of these religious refugees in the early modern example of deterritorialization and religious persecution. While the Spanish felt kinship with the Irish through their shared hatred of the English, the English recusants themselves were often subject to suspicion by Spaniards who found themselves unable to see beyond these men’s nationality and embrace them as global Catholic subjects. This chapter examines the religious politics of this deterritorialization and how built into their migrancy was the possibility of a return to the homeland and the specter of martyrdom. The sixteenth-century upheaval caused by the European Reformation saw Catholic subjects fleeing England and Ireland to Spain and Portugal and other Catholic continental strongholds, and Protestant refugees making the reverse journey from Catholic territories to seek safe haven in England and other Protestant countries. In his study Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World, Nicholas Terpstra deems the reformation not just a “movement for social and intellectual change” but also Europe’s first “grand project in social purification” (7). This “sharp language of purification and purgation” with its origins in medical discourse was adopted by religious reformers and, in the early modern period, “the drive to purge and purify reshaped Europe and the globe” (2) through the creation of diasporic communities across Europe and beyond (5). Religion provided the principal force behind this migration, although these movements and mobilizations were complex and other factors too came into play. These religious migratory movements changed the nature of both religious practice and settlement across a wide range of faith and denominations, providing a common framework of suffering to religious groups that found themselves radically at odds in other ways (Kroeker 1). This chapter will focus on young men who sought a Catholic education and the opportunity to take holy orders and who constitute a subset of the Catholic refugees who fled England and Ireland for the Iberian Peninsula. I do not purport to offer new historical insights into the complexities surrounding these religious refugees but rather examine how these religious migrants were depicted in Catholic writings of the time as well as investigate the transformation of these migrant bodies into martyrs within the framework of clerical masculinity. Finally, my overall

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goal is to add to the conversation on the phenomena of religious migrancy during the early modern period. While most studies engaged with the topic of religious migration and England have focused on the waves of popular Protestant migration to England and what is now the United States, Catholics also fled their homes in England although this migration was principally, although not exclusively, a clerical phenomenon. We see a similar pattern of movement in Ireland, with young men leaving their homes in both countries in search of a religious education and the chance to take holy orders without censure. In broad strokes, this history tells of a series of events and royal decrees that caused many of these migrant Irish and English young men to seek refuge in continental Europe where they might practice and study their religion without fear of persecution and punishment. Among the most impactful of these events we find the Tudor Protestant State’s active takeover of Ireland in 1534, institutional Catholic oppression in England being reasserted through the settlement of 1559, and the Act of Uniformity and Parliament’s declaration that being a Jesuit or a seminarian constituted an act of treason. In the early modern period, the Catholic refugees I examine here thus fall wholly into the category of religious victims of State repression. While some had indeed lost their lands and other possessions, they did not flee to Spain for economic reasons as the Crown there made it clear that no opportunities for advancement existed for them, although exceptions to this rule continued to present themselves. These young men were, however, guaranteed at least a short-term existence free from religious repression and faith-based persecution and, most significantly, were able to forge transnational communities based on their shared membership in a Catholic commonwealth. This Catholic commonwealth offered a critique of “the emerging model of English nationhood” (part of which was predicated on England’s colonization of Ireland) holding the doctrine that “in extraordinary circumstances” the papacy could “depose tyrannical or heretical Christian sovereigns” (Lockey 7). In going to Spain to study and take holy orders and then return to England or Ireland to spread the true faith and save souls, they evinced what Brian Lockey has called a “global perspective,” which is shown most particularly in their desire to view England and Ireland as part of Christendom or an encompassing Christian commonwealth in which Papal Supremacy would promote a cosmopolitan identity that ruled above all nations and empires and that was truly a transnational imperium (Lockey 72). Their status as religious migrants allowed these young men to fashion a new identity as global Catholic citizens. While they lost their homes and contact with their families and were forced to seek asylum in Spain and Portugal, migration allowed them to reimagine themselves as part of a larger community than that of the beleaguered recusant English minority or the colonized and suppressed Irish Catholic majority and helped mitigate the “sense of loss, displacement and alienation” operational in early modern migration stories (Kroeke 1). In their status as a community of Catholic or confessional refugees, figures such as the English and Irish Jesuits as well as men of other orders and secular priests (non-monastics) who studied in the European colleges “posit alternatives to the dominant narrative of nation formation” (Lockey 34).

Early modern religious displacement 147 These refugees cannot be viewed as passive victims of religious conflict and instead must be viewed as political and religious actors through the training and preparation for the return to their homelands as missionaries and perhaps even martyrs that they received through the institutions of the colleges, risking their lives to return their fellow subjects to the true faith, what the eminent Spanish Jesuit described as the mission to “uproot the thorns and the weeds from that neglected and abandoned vineyard” (665). The return home – reverse migration if you will – was built into their status as Catholic migrants and the Spanish Crown made the funding it offered contingent on this. In addition to his support of the colleges, Phillip III offered each young man who returned to his homeland mission a sum of 10 pounds in the form of a viaticum, the name of which derived from the Ancient Greek tradition of offering a meal to he who planned to embark on a journey. Not only was there a financial incentive embedded in the return home, but also students at both the English and the Irish colleges were obliged to swear an oath, promising that upon completion of their studies they would fulfill this obligation. The oath declared the following: Mindful of the benefits that God our Lord has done me, first and foremost in having me removed from my homeland, which is so beset by heresies, and in having made me a member of his Catholic Church, wishing not to be ungrateful for so great a mercy of the Lord, have resolved to offer myself entirely to his divine service, to the extent that I can, in fulfillment of the aims of this college. And thus I promise and swear by Almighty God, that I am prepared in my soul, in as far as his divine grace will aid me, to receive holy orders in good time, and to return to England to seek win and convert the souls of my neighbors as and when the superiors of this college, according to its institute, judges it good, commanding me so in the Lord. (Ribadeneyra 666) What this oath fails to render explicit, however, is the possibility of martyrdom that awaited these young men, particularly in the case of the English, on their return home. And since the possibility of martyrdom was inculcated in them from the minute they arrived in the country of refuge, the identity of martyr became inextricably bound up with that of migrant. Indeed, the first Catholic martyrs of Elizabeth’s reign – the Jesuits Edmund Campion and Alexander Briant and the secular priest Ralph Sherwin executed together at Tyburn in 1581 – had graduated from the continental colleges and had taken the decision to return home to possible if not certain death having taken holy orders while religious refugees. Thomas Benstead was the first of the students of St. Albans’ English college at Valladolid to become a martyr at the age of 21. Twenty-six others then followed, and 6 were canonized by the Church, with a further 16 beatified. Other factors consolidated the connection between religious refugee and martyr. While the colleges seemingly offered a safe haven from religious persecution of the homeland, life in exile remained fraught with danger. The English Crown had placed counterintelligence agents and spies at St. Albans, where, posing as religious migrants themselves,

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they monitored all seditious activities and provided information that would allow for immediate arrest once the newly ordained priests returned home.1 Some of these men, however, never returned to their homelands again and instead made the transition from migrant to global Catholic citizens in Spain and its empire and beyond. Thomas O’Connor takes a more open view regarding the return to the native mission, explaining that since the Irish Church was in a precarious state and the Irish students often lived in penury on the continent, “it is not surprising that there was considerable leakage out of the colleges into religious ministries abroad” (355). Those who did go abroad, according to O’Connor, tended to be those who had distinguished themselves during their studies and seminary training, and he dubs them “highflyers” (“Roles of the Early Modern Catholic Diaspora” 357). The Irish Church founded 29 colleges on the continent between 1589 and 1649. The most famous in Spain being that in Salamanca, which Philip III founded in 1593 at the petition of Father Thomas White, S.J., and that bore the name of El Real Colegio de Nobles Irlandeses. Other Irish colleges soon followed in Alcalá de Henares (the only college not governed by the Jesuits, it trained men for the secular priesthood2), Santiago de Compostela, Seville, Madrid, and Lisbon, Portugal. The Jesuit Robert Persons, a key figure in the establishment of the English mission to convert the Protestant heretics, had founded the English colleges in Spain, the most significant of which was the aforementioned St. Albans, named after England’s proto martyr, founded in the conservative city of Valladolid in 1589, where in 1559 Spanish Protestants had been burned at the stake. In establishing the College of St. Albans, Persons undertook “a strategic step to consolidate the strength of the mission to convert England,” and since Spain was the “bastion of Catholic faith,” the location proved ideal (Cano-Echevarría and Sáez-Hidalgo 93). Subsequent foundations occurred in Seville in 1592 and Lisbon in 1622. The Irish and English colleges served as cultural, educational, and political centers for the communities in exile, including merchants and Irish and English Catholic soldiers who found employment in the King of Spain’s armies. Young men would enter the institution at around 18 years of age, having gained some knowledge of Latin at home, and would enroll usually for a period of seven years following the typical period of study. In their global educational institutions, the Jesuits strove to model the young men who studied there in their own image, providing a dynamic environment of rigorous learning, presentation, and performance skills – disquisition, rhetoric – to gain hegemony over intellectual production and elite scholarly and religious masculinity. In many cases, anxiety surrounding their position pushed them to excel even beyond the limits of the customary excellence of the Jesuit colleges, and on a royal visit Phillip II and his courtiers made to the college at Valladolid, Persons explains in a text he wrote to mark the occasion how the students outdid themselves in their rhetorical performances in ten languages (56). Despite the similarity in the training these English and Irish colleges offered to the global Jesuit model, and the fact that their rectors were almost always Spanish Jesuits, differences marked these institutions from those with whom they shared the urban Spanish landscape and that marked the young

Early modern religious displacement 149 men who studied there. Although fervent Catholics, these religious migrants were often distrusted as subjects of a Crown who was either Spain’s sworn enemy or tolerated rival. While England and Spain maintained a fraught relationship that lurched from enmity to delicate diplomatic tensions, Ireland and Spain had built a relationship developed through the shared hatred of England but also on the foundations of a common religion. At the same time, Spain, ironically, provided a model that England emulated in some ways, including in its conquest of Ireland.3 These refugees, however, dependent to a great extent on Spain’s largesse, could not quite shake the burden of the nations they fled and often, as in the case of the English, found themselves subject to suspicion and hostility despite the common cause their religion made with their host country. Persons himself spoke of the “great aversion” the Spanish populace held for them as a “consequence of the hatred that the English name has achieved in these parts” (qtd. in Cano-Echevarría and Sáez-Hidalgo 95). Meanwhile, Catholicism forged a natural bond between Ireland and Spain, and indeed some have spoken of a Gaelic Hispanophilism and a sense of a shared cultural or even ethnic identity existed. As the English pushed into Ireland attempting to impose the Anglican revolution there, Irish Catholics turned to Spain for both military and emotional support, and in their role of chief international Catholic power, the Spanish Crown championed their beleaguered coreligionists. According to Declan Downey, despite the geographical distance between Ireland and Spain, a feeling of a pan-Iberianism existed, with Irish in Spain declared to be “nuestros hermanos del Norte”; and he speaks of an easy flow of Irish citizens into Spain from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries (225). A cultural connection between the two nations began in the Middle Ages in a variety of disparate texts over centuries beginning with Isidore of Seville, whose influence on sixteenth-century Irish works was “so pronounced that some Irish works were erroneously attributed to the Spanish author” (Recio Morales 34). These close bonds notwithstanding, the Irish also suffered due to their status as colonized English subjects. Some students, particularly the English, were imprisoned as spies, and Persons took great pains to constantly stress English Catholic loyalty to Spain and its monarch and to represent Spain as an exemplary and orthodox staging ground for young men who lived in exile – destierro – Spain “el Reyno tan Catolico” always wanting to return to secure “la conversion de la patria.” Writing to secure the release of young English migrants imprisoned in Burgos, for example, he explains that their imprisonment was divinely provident for them because it allowed Spaniards to understand their cause and know how many good English Catholics there were ready to sacrifice their sons to bring the nation back from heresy (qtd. in Hillgarth 405). Like many religious refugees, these young men were forced to confront challenges to their presence as migrants in Spain, and it seemed that only the most performative exemplarity would save them from suspicion, which Persons himself described when noting the “hatred that the English name has achieved in these past years,” thanks to the actions of the Protestants (qtd. in Cano-Echevarría and Sáez-Hidalgo 95). He makes common cause between Spaniards and English Catholics by severing the ties between the latter and the “heretics who are between them more enemies than any nation is

150 Stephanie Kirk of the English” (qtd. in Cano-Echevarría and Sáez-Hidalgo 95). In this formulation, the English Catholics forced to flee their country are the ones who retain their nationality, while the English Protestants’ heresy renders them stateless. Despite the optimism Persons displays in his texts, the reality of the cultural conflict the English migrants encountered in Spain belied the discursive bridges he built in his writings. Even among the Society of Jesuits, nationalism would sometimes outweigh the bonds of transnational brotherhood, and Persons at times found the “provincialism” and “myopia” of the Spanish Jesuits irritating (McCoog). Jesuit historian Thomas McCoog refers to his role as peacemaker when conflicts arose between English and Spanish Jesuits so as to prevent a “personal irritation into a national conflict that would threaten the very existence of these institutions” (McCoog). Despite the difficulties associated with the assimilation of these religious migrants into Spanish society, the solidarity provided by the Church and the Society of Jesus provided a temporary refuge from the danger of the homeland. However, despite a shared religion and a common goal, the welcome afforded the English migrants often proved to be precarious.

Jesuit masculinity in the English and Irish colleges The colleges had not begun exclusively as seminaries, but eventually this is what they indeed became as the persecution of Irish and English Catholics gained traction throughout the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth and as the Stuart dynasty replaced the Tudors. The history of the Irish and English colleges displays less than a united front between the various orders with the Jesuits often occupying the position of dominance as rectors of the colleges and other orders and the secular Church resisting their control. The Jesuits possessed the most developed system for transforming incoming clerical migrants into “successful and persevering agents of the Catholic mission” (O’Connor Irish Voices, 98). Their domination of the college network in Iberia as well as the founding of the Irish and English missions allowed them to take their pick of the promising young clerical aspirants coming out of these places, transforming them into “radicalized seminarians” who would embrace the return to the English and Irish mission fields and the hardships and potential martyrdom it entailed (Lockey 5). In England, this was a particularly fraught activity since anti-Catholic legislation such as the 1581 Act to Retain the Queen’s Majesty’s Subjects in the Due Obedience deliberately targeted the missionaries coming out of the continental colleges, explaining that should they be intercepted upon landing in England and caught in the act of persuading a subject of the queen to abandon the established Church in favor of the Church of Rome, they would be guilty of high treason. And in 1591, Elizabeth issued a proclamation singling out the English college in Valladolid whose existence she blamed on the King of Spain, who she accuses of conspiring with English clerics: “who, for furthering of other intentions against England, has dealt with Cardinal Allen and Father Persons to gather together with great labor upon his charges a multitude of dissolute youthes to begin this seminary of Valladolid and others in Spaine” (qtd. in Hillgarth 406). Elizabeth’s words, however, served only to inspire young

Early modern religious displacement 151 Catholic men, and Robert Persons himself describes the relative flooding of young English refugees to Valladolid “every week I see them come hither … faster than the rooms can be made ready” (qtd. in Hillgarth 406). The Society of Jesus’s Catholic identity was bound closely to that of Spain and the English and Irish young men studying in the Iberian colleges came under their charismatic sway. Persons, the English Jesuit, was convinced that Spain held the key to returning England to Catholicism. Persons, himself forced to leave England amid threats to his life, perhaps best exemplifies the cosmopolitan migrant subject Lockey identifies. The epistolary framing he gave to many of his works allowed him to build a stronger sense of community among the refugees dispersed throughout Catholic Europe. Lockey draws on the work of Benedict Anderson to show how Persons provided a textual link between the Catholics in England and those living as refugees in Europe. Moreover, his works possessed a deep transnationalism – he wrote in Latin or English and translated his own works into Spanish. He owned a printing press at Rouen and published the works of other exiled English Jesuits such as John Gerard and commissioned their translation into French, German, and Italian (Lockey 81). This trajectory, although influenced by the specific circumstances of his exile from England and his work with the English clerical migrants, shows the clear hallmarks of transnational Jesuit masculinity in which the politics of print, translation, and knowledge are all mobilized in the service the Society’s hegemony as agents of the counterreformation and as exemplary scholar/missionaries. Under the tutelage of the Spanish Jesuits who acted as rectors, and the overall supervision of Persons, the colleges thus became laboratories of Catholic and specifically Jesuit masculinity as young men suffering from the psychic effects of deterritorialization received a bellicose counterreformation religious education that held martyrdom in the mission field of the home country as the ultimate manifestation of masculine agency and exemplarity. Martyrdom functioned as one of the facets of early modern Jesuit masculinity that, drawing on the conversion and formation of its founder, presented itself as a dynamic force that engaged with society instead of withdrawing from it. At the center of this dynamic masculinity was the knowledge that each Jesuit acquired during his years of rigorous education in the college and seminary. Moreover, the manifestation of potential sacrifice and bravery helped smooth the experiences of young English refugees in Spain who, as I mentioned earlier, were often viewed askance by locals (Cano-Echevarría and Sáez-Hidalgo 93).

From migrants to martyrs Transforming migrants into martyrs thus helped mitigate the author of distrust around the seminarians, and martyrdom provided “highly effective touchstones of group identity” (Terpstra 320). Martyrdom became the currency that kept the colleges going. Christopher Highley has drawn a distinction between exile and martyrdom, detailing how, in his opinion, critics have been drawn more to the latter than the former because of its “more sensational components of imprisonment, torture and execution” (24). Other reasons led martyrdom to be promoted over

152 Stephanie Kirk exile as a more complete form of sacrifice in the early modern period. According to Highley, “Christian culture defined martyrdom as the ultimate doctrinal form of witnessing” (24). But exile, he explains, contained “little doctrinal advocacy” (24). Martyrdom, in addition, had developed its own set of “representational forms,” including martyrology and hagiography (24). Whereas martyrs were celebrated those who went into exile, they were sometimes critiqued for supposedly attempting to avoid this fate (Highley 24). In the case of those who migrated to Spain, we can see that exile functioned as a necessary step in the path toward martyrdom. In order to return to England and Ireland and propagate the faith and risk losing their lives, the young men first had to study in the colleges and take holy orders. Perhaps rather than offering an alternative to martyrdom, we can see how it functions as a springboard.4 In St. Albans, which still functions as a seminary today, a clear visual representation of martyrdom’s strategic power can be found. In the seminary’s gallery hangs a long line of portraits of martyr-priests. The earliest dates from 1620 although others are more recent. Michael Williams draws a distinction between the martyr paintings in the English college in Rome where one finds depictions of scenes of martyrdom and those in Valladolid that bear few indications of violence (297). Instead, as he explains, they were intended to offer students models of “persons like themselves” or their professors (297). While some of the paintings offer illustrations of violent death in the background – such as a hangman in the act of dismembering the victim or bear signs of martyrdom such as the palm or the crown – Williams explains that the main focus is one the unremarkable portrait of the subject who is dressed in his priestly garb. The paintings feature a plaque with the man’s name, any alias he might have used to avoid capture in the English mission, and place of birth and death. These pictures normalize martyrdom for the students, making them realize that while considered to be a true sacrifice in the name of God, it was but one step in the journey of the migrant priest on his return home. For Cano-Echevarría and Sáez-Hidalgo, the artwork exhibited at St. Albans points to the bigger context of the Catholic refugee as discussed by Lockey as they explain how the paintings served to reinforce a performative “sense of community and Englishness” during a ceremony that would take place whenever news came of the martyrdom of a student in the English mission when all would gather in front of the artwork and a “Te Deum” would be sung (101). At the same time, the images of English martyrs of the early Church such as St. Albans, England’s protomartyr, linked the college and its students to the wider and global Church. Besides pictorial representations, writings produced by both Spanish and English clerics seized on the trope of the return to martyrdom to press for acceptance in Spanish society and memorialize their sacrifice for generations to come for Catholic adherents. Writings such as the Historia particular de la persecucion de Inglaterra y de los martirios mas insignes que en ella ha habido desde el anio del Senor 1570 by Diego de Yepes, Hieronymite, Confessor to Phillip II and Bishop of Tarragona and the noble Jesuit Pedro de Ribadeneyra, original companion of Ignatius of Loyola, whose history of the English Reformation,

Early modern religious displacement 153 Ecclesiastical History of the Schism of the Kingdom of England, included important chapters on the colleges and their martyrs and helped promote tolerance for confessional migrants. Exhorts Phillip III, “you should wonder at the patience and fortitude of our sainted martyrs, and both sorrow for the many, noble, wealthy English youths who wander in exile from their home for the sake of our Catholic faith” (551). He leverages this martyrdom to request the king continue his support for these refugees. He offers a specific connection between the education the migrants received in the colleges and fitness for the mission, explaining how they returned to their homeland with the “weapons” of their education, ready to “defend – and die for – the truth” (444). He also presents the statelessness of young men as fertile recruiting ground for the Society of Jesus, explaining how “in their days of exile, many of this nation (England), men of exemplary life and learning, had entered the Society of Jesus and settled beneath its banner” (444). Spencer Weinreich, editor of the Schism, here points out that the use of words such as “banner” or “standards” permeates the earliest documents of the Society (444) but it also speaks, it must be noted, to the idea of how the Catholic Church presented itself as a substitute for those expelled from their homelands. The act of migrancy for Ribadeneyra fortifies the potential martyr creating a connection between the two. The action of leaving one’s country in the most adverse and dangerous of circumstances prepares the subject for the even more dangerous return and the glorious horror of martyrdom. In order to further persuade the king of the necessity to support the colleges, Ribadeneyra includes a letter from a seminarian, Francis Montfort, to the Pontiff Clement VIII in 1592, in which he details the reasons why he is willing to abandon continental Europe and refuge for a return to the homeland. England as Catholic country was “a delightful garden of holiness and religion” (546), but now Protestant has become “a forest of beasts and a wilderness of errors and heresies” (669). But Montfort must return to this place, leaving behind the protection of the Catholic nation, and he was executed by the English Crown shortly after arriving in London at the age of about 26 and after undergoing the arduous and dangerous journey back to the homeland. Learning about the experiences of those such as Montfort served, in theory, to inspire those still in Spain. Persons, unsurprisingly, also saw migrancy and martyrdom as possessing a symbiotic relationship and he connected the act of seeking refuge in Spain to the return to the homeland and martyrdom. In a pamphlet, he wrote about the college and dedicated it to the Infanta Isabela Clara, explaining how “this important enterprise of the conversion of England should prosper and from this Spanish seminary a copious harvest of glorious martyrs shall rise – like those from the seminaries in Rome and Reims be collected” (qtd. in Cano-Echevarría and Sáez-Hidalgo 94). In an attempt, perhaps, to win favor from the Spanish and to consolidate funds, Persons brought Spain firmly into the discussion of English martyrs, claiming that many English Catholics were put to death because of they expressed their great love of their adopted home country of Spain. There were exceptions, however, and a smaller group succeeded in staying in Spain to work at the colleges or, in some cases, embarked for the unknown

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territories of the New World mission. The latter option was not by most accounts an easy one. The Spanish Crown imposed controls on the movement of foreigners from Spain to the New World, and the English and Irish clergy offered no exception to this rule, with the Casa de Contratación in Seville monitoring the movement of people to the Americas (O’Connor 97). For the foreign clergy, the Crown required a lengthy period in Spain before travel to the New World could be guaranteed. Nonetheless, despite these obstacles, connections existed between the Irish and English colleges in Spain and the New World mission fields. In 1620, Phillip III addressed a cédula – a royal order – to the viceroys of Peru and New Spain, granting a four-year permit that allowed for the collection of alms on behalf of the Irish colleges in Spain there, suggesting that perhaps the monarchs may have had this circuit partly in mind when they permitted the establishment of these college networks within their realm (O’Connor 97). And apparently 170 copies of Creswell’s Martirio que padeció el padre Henrique Walpolo, which told of the death of the Jesuit Henry Walpole, founder and teacher of the English college of St. Gregory’s in Seville, were shipped to Peru in 1595, further demonstrating an interest there in the fate of the English migrant martyrs (Murphy 21). Martyrdom drove those who also wanted to migrate to the New World and save souls there. A notable example is provided in the seventeenth-century Jesuit, Michael Wadding, who came from a prestigious Irish Catholic family in Waterford and who, after studying at the Colegio de Nobles Irlandeses in Salamanca and under his Hispanicized name of Miguel Godinez, braved eight years in the dangers of the mission fields of the New Spanish Northern frontier before becoming the confessor of the famous poblana mystic, Sor Maria Jesus Tomellín, and the author of the first theological work on mysticism: Práctica de la teología mística. Many of the students deemed the journey both to and from the English and Irish missions as more hazardous than that to the New World. Many detours had to be made, they could be captured at sea by religious enemies of the nation in whose ship they sailed, they were forced to travel in disguise as soldiers, merchants, or even cabin boys, and spies were everywhere. The New World journey was, of course, full of peril, and the mission fields of the Northern frontier of New Spain were themselves replete with danger. While never meeting the glorious end of martyrdom himself, Wadding describes treks full of peril through Sinaloa, where many of his brethren met their end as they attempted to win the souls of the indigenous peoples for Christendom. Godinez/Wadding’s transnational migrancy from Ireland to Spain to New Spain reinforces the slippage between migrant and martyr, which is also apparent in the Iberian college network with their built-in return to the homeland for men who had been previously expelled for their faith. Ribadaneyra also highlights this transnational circuit when, in the Schism, he directly addresses those agents of the English Crown directly engaged in the execution of English priests: By the same means you employ to torment, murder, and defame as traitors those servants of the Lord, the Lord himself will honor them all the more and render them glorious across the globe. And I have seen the image of the blessed Father Edmund Campion of the Society of Jesus – whom you so

Early modern religious displacement 155 furiously slew in London for his Catholic faith, deftly rendered with the pen even in the Indies – that Father Edmund Campion bound and stretched and dismembered on your rack as you tortured him, is held and revered there (as he is here) as a martyr of Jesus. Ribadaneyra here promotes a transnationalism Catholic commonwealth built on the cosmopolitan blood of migrants and martyrs that undercuts the heretical confines of the nation of England at every turn.

Notes 1 The most infamous of these spies was Titus Oates, who entered St. Albans in 1677 but was expelled five months later and sent back to England. He later succeeded in entering the College of St. Omer only to be expelled from there. Shortly afterward, he concocted the Popish Plot, in which he accused a network of Jesuits and other Catholics of plotting to murder Charles I and place his brother James, Duke of York, on the throne. More than 30 Catholics were put to death on his evidence. 2 For a detailed study of this college, see Patricia O’Connell’s The Irish College at Alcalá de Henares. 3 J.H. Elliott elucidates the differences between the Spanish conquest practices and English attempts to subdue Ireland but also points to some of the models they tried to emulate, including wholesale expulsion of Moriscos from the Iberian Peninsula. He details the “grudging admiration” for what appeared to be the conversion of the Aztecs to “Christianity and civility, even if the Christianity they introduced was full of popish superstitions” (38). 4 Highley describes how exile was sometimes viewed as a “bloodless” or “white” martyrdom, “unlike the ‘red’ martyrs who died for their convictions” (24).

Works cited Cano-Echevarría, Berta and Ana Sáez-Hidalgo. “Educating for Martyrdom: British Exiles in the English College at Valladolid.” Diaspora in Early Modern Europe: Strategies of Exile. Ed. Timothy G. Fehler et al. Routledge, 2014, pp. 93–106. Downey, Declan. “Purity of Blood and Purity of Faith in Early Modern Ireland.” The Origins of Sectarianism in Early Modern Ireland. Ed. Alan Ford and John McCafferty. Cambridge University Press, 2009. 216–228. Elliott, J.H. Spain, Europe and the Wider World, 1500–1800. Yale University Press, 2009. Fehler, Timothy G. et al. Diaspora in Early Modern Europe: Strategies of Exile. Routledge, 2014. Highley, Christopher. Catholics Writing the Nation in Early Modern Britain and Ireland. Oxford University Press, 2008. Hilgarth, J. N. The Mirror of Spain, 1500–1700: The Formation of a Myth. University of Michigan Press, 2000. Kroeker, Greta Grace. “Introduction.” Religious Diaspora in Early Modern Europe: Strategies of Exile. Ed. Timothy G. Fehler et al. Routledge, 2014, pp. 1–8. Lockey, Brian. Early Modern Catholics, Royalists, and Cosmopolitans: English Transnationalism and the Christian Commonwealth. Ashgate, 2015. McCoog, Thomas S.J. “Persons the Peacemaker.” Thinking Faith. Posted on: 19th May 2010. https://www.thinkingfaith.org/articles/20100519_1.htm

156 Stephanie Kirk Murphy, Martin. St. Gregory’s College, Seville 1592–1767. Catholic Record Society, 1993. O’Connell, Patricia. The Irish College at Alacalá de Henares 1649–1785. Four Courts Press, 1997. O’Connor, Thomas. Irish Voices from the Spanish Inquisition: Migrants, Converts and Brokers in Early Modern Iberia. Palgrave, 2016. Persons, Robert. Relacion de vn sacerdote ingles, escrita a Flandes, à vn cauallero de su tierra en la qual le da cuenta de la venida de su Magestad a Valladolid, y al Colegio de los Ingleses, y lo que alli se hizo en su recebimiento. [By Robert Persons.] Traduzida de Ingles en Castellano, por Tomas Eclesal cauallero ingles [pseudonym of H. Cristóbal López]. Pedro Madrigal, 1592. Recio Morales, Óscar. Ireland and the Spanish Empire. 1600–1825. Trans. Michael White. Four Courts Press, 2010. Ribadeneyra, Pedro de. Pedro de Ribadeneyra’s 'Ecclesiastical History of the Schism of the Kingdom of England': A Spanish Jesuit’s History of the English Reformation. Ed. Spenser Weinreich. Brill, 2017. Terpstra, Nicholas. Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World. Cambridge University Press, 2015. Wiliams, Michael. “Campion and the English Continental Seminaries.” The Reckoned Expense: Edmund Campion and the Early English Jesuits: Essays in Celebration of the First Centenary of Campion Hall, Oxford (1896–1996). Ed. Thomas M. McCoog, S.J. Boydell and Brewer, 1996. 285–300.

12 Andean and Amazonian displacements Culture and the effects of deforestation José Antonio Mazzotti

A long history of migration in the Andes1 Let us start by recalling that social migration has in the Andean territory a history of unattainable proportions.2 The displacement of considerable population groups was a common practice imposed long before the Inca state for purposes of food planning, political unity, and military stability. There we have, for example, the system of population enclaves established by the Tiwanaku culture within its strategy of dominating various ecological floors throughout the Andes. This is how appears Wari, another of the great urban centers of the Middle Horizon between the sixth and tenth centuries (Bauer 65-67), near the current city of Ayacucho. In turn, Wari gave rise to the ceremonial center of Pachakamaq on the central coast, 26 kilometers south of present-day Lima (Lumbreras 99). Later, the Incas, through the so-called mitmaqkuna or, in their Spanish version, mitimaes (or forced migrants), expanded this practice due to the increasing number of ethnic groups incorporated into the Cuzco administration from the mid-fifteenth century, when it was considered that the great imperial expansion began under the command of Pachakutiq Inka. Pedro de Cieza de León mentions in Chapter 99 of his Chronicle of Peru (1553) that Cuzco’s rulers facilitated the flow of agricultural production, especially corn and uchu (chili or “pimientos” [peppers], as the Spaniards would call them) toward the Colla region, and from there the flow of quinoa and potatoes to the east (Antisuyu) and west (Chinchaysuyu) by establishing population enclaves aimed at increasing agricultural production.3 The mitimae, in this way, was perceived as a foreigner who had no choice but to adapt to the new environment, but that due to his important labor contribution ended up being accepted by the receiving population, if there was one. Likewise, the Inca Garcilaso and Guaman Poma de Ayala tell us that in certain cases, the purpose of the mass movement was the assurance of political loyalties and the prevention of secessionist rebellions.4 This perfectly logical perception of the migrant as a foreigner is exploited by Guaman Poma later for his characterization of the Spaniards, since for him they were only foreigners without property rights over the Andean territory:

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José Antonio Mazzotti Y los indios son propietarios naturales deste rreyno, y los españoles, naturales de España. Acá en este rreyno son estrangeros, mytimays. Cada uno en su rreyno son propietarios lexítimos, possedores, no por el rrey, cino por Dios y por justicia de Dios. (f. 915 [929], 858) [And the Indians are natural owners of this kingdom, and the Spanish, natives of Spain. Here in this kingdom they are strangers, mytimays. Each one in his kingdom are legitimate owners, possessors, not by the king, but by God and by the justice of God.]

Guaman Poma extended the same concept to the children of Spaniards born in the Indies, that is, the Creoles, undoubtedly inspired by the doctrine of restitution that Bartolomé de las Casas defended in his last years (especially in his Tratado de las doce dudas [Treaty of the Twelve Doubts] and in De los tesoros del Perú [On the Treasures of Peru]): “no ay propetario español en este rreyno, aunque sea nacido en este rreyno, hijo de estrangero, mitimacpa churin, mitimacpa huahauynin” (f. 657 [671], 620; my emphasis) [“There is no Spanish owner in this kingdom, although born in this kingdom, children of foreigners, mitimacpa churin, mitimacpa huahauynin.”]. Guaman Poma perceives the first Creoles, then, as mitimaes, and given that they are among the initiators of the scriptural tradition in the Andean region, together with peninsular authors (and on a much smaller scale with indigenous and mestizo authors), such tradition would constitute a legislative and literary practice also perceived as foreigner. Ángel Rama (1984) would aptly call it the “lettered city.” The practice of alphabetic writing as a factor of social and discursive domination began, then, as an exercise in immigration that rarely admitted subjects from outside its walls. The simple factor of practicing Spanish or Creole in the territory of the New World, or of appropriating it a native with obvious indigenous blood and language, implies transference of elements that in some cases generate multi-semic texts by the simple fact of already being bicultural.5 As part of the consolidation of the viceregal administration system, indigenous migrations were reinforced by the mit’a system that Viceroy Toledo (1569–1581) adapted for mining as a mandatory tribute. Temporary or permanent population displacements were thus taken to even greater proportions, but without the sense of reciprocity that the Incas had respected. Even before the so-called period of colonial stabilization (García-Bedoya 197), which is nothing other than the strengthening of the viceregal administrative system according to the economic needs of the metropolis during the last decades of the sixteenth century, the indigenous population saw itself highly depleted by forced labor, epidemics, malnutrition, and other evils inherited from the initial Westernization of the globe. It is estimated that between the excessive tribute of the encomenderos (land owners in charge of indigenous population) and later the corregidores (Crown officers), as well as the epidemics of 1546, 1558–1559, and 1585, the estimated indigenous population (between 4 and 15 million before 1532) was reduced to only 1 million

Andean and Amazonian displacements 159 300 thousand in 1570 and 700,000 in 1620 (Klarén 49-50). These numbers are tremendously alarming, since it is no longer serious to just look at the benefits brought by the Europeans (alphabetical writing, transcontinental trade, new plants and animals, various types of cultural institutions and practices – for some the Catholic religion as the most important, etc.), but also at the dark side of that gradual immigration of Spaniards and African slaves in relation to the indigenous population and their subsequent redistribution under the system of reductions. In spite of the continuous protective measures of the Spanish legislation toward the Indians, the failure of the viceregal system in the improvement of their standard of living and the construction of the “common good” far exceeded any good intentions. The story is too long and well known. External and internal migrations contributed to the development of a mining extraction production system in place of agricultural production and its dominance of ecological floors, perfected over many centuries of Andean civilizations. The displacement of the indigenous population was complemented by the forced importation of slaves, mostly from centralwestern Africa. Fernando Romero (138) collects the data of 3,600 black slaves in Peru in 1554. Ten years later, slaves outnumbered the European population, at least in the City of Kings or Lima. And in 1629, Bernabé Cobo points out that the capital of the Viceroyalty had a population of 25,000 Spaniards, 30,000 blacks, and 5,000 Indians (Romero 139). By the middle of the seventeenth century, it is estimated that in Upper Peru (Charcas or current Bolivia), due to the important economic activity derived from the boom in the exploitation of silver from Potosí, there were already 50,000 slaves, mostly Angolan (Romero 147). Many of them played a fundamental role both in the consolidation of Spanish domination and later in the wars of independence.6 Likewise, the few Asian immigrants who arrived through the galleon of Manila, first to Mexico and then to Peru (in 1613 only 38 were registered in Lima), saw their number increased with the surge of importing labor in the nineteenth century. “Between 1849-1879, the hacienda owners and concessionaires of guano [bird manure used as fertilizer] made the transfer of about 100,000 coolies [Chinese laborers]” (Chang-Rodríguez 393). That almost forced and massive importation expanded with the arrival in 1899 of the Sakura Maru ship, which brought from Japan “790 Japanese immigrants, all male, between the ages of 20 and 45” (Watanabe, Morimoto and Chambi 15). Already by 1923, the Japanese added “18,258 people, of which 2,145 were women and 226 children” (ibid.). And we must not forget that migrants of European origin, mainly Spanish and Italian, contributed to further diversify the racial and cultural composition of the country through its definitive installation on Peruvian soil during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.7 In this way, the Creole state inaugurated in 1821 was surpassed again and again by a multilingual and multiethnic reality, in which the indigenous presence continued to weigh decisively, including the less known and regulated sectors under the new power, such as the numerous Amazonian communities.

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To this we must add the strong migratory flow from the countryside to the city, to the point of turning the country into a mainly urban society since the 1960s. This phenomenon, widely studied (see, for example, Matos Mar), is developed to unprecedented proportions with the forced displacements of hunger and terror of the 1980s.8 Along with this, especially in the last decades of the twentieth century, Peru traditionally goes from being a country of foreign immigrants to one of emigrants. While there are huge internal migrations, which definitely changed the face of cities such as Lima, Trujillo, or Arequipa, it should be recognized, as pointed out by Teófilo Altamirano, that “in relation to international migration, it is [that of 1980] the decade of the acceleration of the exodus” (Éxodo: peruanos en el exterior 66-67). Therefore, within the context of international migration, Peru appears as a country of constant emigration growth. Around 3 million Peruvians are abroad, that is, approximately 10% of the total population. Although this percentage is not extremely high, however, its qualitative impact is greater. This impact will increase as the exodus continues. And there is no doubt that it has continued. The numerous communities of Peruvians abroad reveal not only a physical abandonment of the country in search of better life opportunities (in many studies it is preferred to talk about economic refugees and not simply immigrants), but also a more direct exposure to cultures that only traditional dominant sectors accessed before.9 To this we must add, among those who stayed, the growing presence of mass media (cable TV, Internet, and the well-known local cinema, radio and television), which train young people from a very early age – especially since the reprivatization of the mass media with the return to formal democracy in Peru in 1980 – in socio-communicative practices and cultural references previously unknown to the elderly.

Mining and current displacements The neoliberal economic model entered Latin America with the Chilean military coup of 1973 and the experiments of the so-called Chicago Boys in the Chilean economy. The formula of massive privatizations, free market, loss of the working class’s rights, and the shrinking of the national state was an example soon followed by the dictatorships of Rafael Videla in Argentina and Francisco Morales Bermúdez in Peru in the late 1970s. In the northern hemisphere, it is well known that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher implemented these policies in the 1980s in order to increase economic growth and redirect wealth distribution to the privileged minority. In order to do so, the model is also based on an almost indiscriminate extractivism of natural resources, which in the last decades has increased global warming, pollution, and the extinction of water resources and natural species. Going back to Peru, for example, mining activities have increased in almost a 1,000% in the last decades. Just over a century ago, in 1913, mines throughout the country employed 19,500 workers, mostly of peasant origin. Today,

Andean and Amazonian displacements 161 already in the twenty-first century, there are at least 220,000 workers “dedicated to extractive activity, of which just over 65 thousand are on payroll. The rest is hired by about 100 ‘services’ distributed nationwide” (Huanca Urrutia). In other words, the mining activity has grown by more than a thousand percent in a century, but the exploitation of workers remains the same, contributing, in addition, to diseases, underemployment, and environmental pollution. And this happens without counting the growing informal mining, which also employs tens of thousands of workers and contributes to the depredation and deterioration of the environment, causing massive displacements of population within the country. One of the largest mines in Peru, the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation already had by 1915, according to historians Manuel Burga and Alberto Flores Galindo, a “crushing success [but] a unilateral success, on the side of the company only, obtained through the over-exploitation of the work of the miner and the ecological destruction of a vast agricultural region” (74-75). And not only that, historians add, because “the poisonous fumes from the smelter affected large areas of agricultural and livestock land: the total area affected by the fumes was 700,000 hectares” (76). This, as I said, was only at the beginning of twentieth century. The proportions are much higher today. Due to the contamination of water, and the environment in general, in Cerro de Pasco – to continue with the same example – not only the miners suffer from health problems, but also the surrounding population. As Fidel Torres points out from a comprehensive vision of mining activity: The environmental effect of the mining industry produces potential pollutants that affect water and air. In the natural environment, excesses can be generated by drainage of water from mines, clearings or mining tailings. Some metals, such as cadmium and mercury, and metalloids such as antimony or arsenic, which are very common in small quantities, but in metal deposits are highly toxic, ... particularly in soluble form, which can be absorbed by living organisms. (Torres 81) According to different studies, pollution in Cerro de Pasco reaches extremely dangerous levels, with the city now listed as one of the ten most polluted ones in the world. This explains the overwhelming presence of heavy metals in the blood in more than 90% of the local population. Also, in the Amazon, only between 2012 and 2016, the gold mining of southern Peru has deforested some 12,503 hectares of forests, according to a report by the Andean Amazon Monitoring Project (MAAP), an initiative from the Amazon Conservation Association and the NGO Conservación Amazónica (see Torres). The main sources of deforestation, according to satellite maps, are found in the Madre de Dios region, the most hit by illegal mining. The affected areas include the Amarakaeri Communal Reserve and the Tambopata National Reserve, in addition to their buffer zones.

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According to the MAAP, previous studies in the same area documented the deforestation of some 50,000 hectares by gold mining, until September 2012. Now, with this new record, the deforested area is 62,500 hectares. In addition to Madre de Dios, other seriously affected regions are Cuzco and Puno. Likewise, the effects of gold exploitation have been severe in the Cajamarca region, where large mining companies such as Yanacocha have polluted the headwaters of lakes and rivers, thus affecting animals and the local people. This region is still struggling to stop the expansion of new mining projects, since the damage produced so far is considerable for the local population. According to Jeffrey Bury, “the linkages between transnational mining corporations and local migration dynamics in Peru” have produced “changes in migration patterns in the Cajamarca region” in the first decades of the new century. An exemplary case study is that of the gold mining operations of Newmont Mining Corporation. Bury considers “household migration behavior in communities surrounding the mine as well as transformations in regional, national, and international migration patterns,” as well as “the temporal nature of these changing patterns across short, medium, and long-term time periods” (Bury 378–379). Displacements of large numbers of people seem to be the common denominator of neocolonialist practices, not too different from the colonial mit’a implemented by viceroy Francisco de Toledo in the 1570s.

The effects of deforestation and the loss of knowledge Turning now to the Amazon rainforest, let us remember that it covers an area of over 2 million square miles, and it is estimated to host over 300 indigenous groups and their corresponding languages. The Amazon is the world’s largest rainforest and the largest river basin on the planet. The World Wild Fund estimates that 27% – more than a quarter – of the Amazon biome will be without trees by 2030 if the current rate of deforestation continues. Unfortunately, recent news about Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro encouraging landowners and cattlers to burn the jungle in order to gain more areas for pasture and soy cultivation is just the tip of an iceberg that has been crashing against the rainforest for a number of years now. Hans Binswanger has demonstrated how “general tax policies, special tax incentives, the rules of land allocation, and the agricultural credit system all [have] accelerate[d] deforestation in the Amazon” (821) since the 1980s and 1990s. During Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s administration between 2003 and 2010, this trend was partially delayed, but it has returned with a vengeance during the former and the current right-wing administrations (Temer and Bolsonaro). Tim Boekhout also “looks at the harm that is inflicted on many of the Amazon’s inhabitants, including indigenous populations such as ‘uncontacted’ tribes of hunters-gatherers, the oldest human societies” (263). In this process, not only current and future humans are affected, but also animals and plant species. Boekhout argues that “as the products of the … deforested rainforest in the Brazilian Amazon

Andean and Amazonian displacements 163 are mainly for export markets, western societies with large ecological footprints could be held responsible for deforestation of the Amazon” (263). Unfortunately, the problem does not stop with deforestation. The fact that many noncontacted groups have to abandon their traditional habitat is also a sign that globalization is taking a heavy token on the richness of environmental, linguistic, and ancestral knowledge. During a long-term research project on an endangered community carried out between 2010 and 2018, I was able to work firsthand with a semi-contacted community, the Iskonawa of the Peruvian central rainforest. This is a community that many specialists considered gone until recent research documented their language and culture. There are very few speakers alive, but they still hold a world of knowledge and oral tradition. Some of the Iskonawa myths of origin and survival tell us about their relationship with nature, their use and interaction with animals and plants, and the bleak future of deforestation, contamination, crime, and drug trafficking. In some of their narratives, it is possible to find alternative views of nature and the world in general that challenge the Westerner and neoliberal approach to the Amazonian basin. In some of those tales, it is possible to find a decolonial perspective that challenges a traditional Western conception of nature as an object to be exploited and dominated. For example, there is the myth of the Isko bird, which shows an acute understanding of the relationships that humans should have with animals, and how they can teach knowledge about the environment and forms of social behavior that have maintained a balance in many communities since ancient times. Likewise, the myth of the origin of the moon’s spots shows the importance of the prohibition of incest and the consequences of indiscriminate hunting. Another important myth is the one that tells how a mouse taught women to give birth, to avoid bleeding. These are some of the stories collected during the fieldwork with the Iskonawa, but there are hundreds of other stories in other communities capable of showing the richness and wisdom of indigenous cultures.10 It is estimated that there are about 60 noncontacted groups in Brazil, about 20 in Colombia, and about 12 in Peru. As for the Quechua-speaking and Aymaraspeaking population, which is several million, much more is known, but not yet enough. Massive population displacements, urbanization of Latin American societies, and the insertion into the global market of hundreds of thousands of producers and consumers of indigenous origin leave little room for the survival of their cultural traditions. While it is true that some of these communities have organized themselves so that they can defend their rights more effectively than 50 years ago, the neoliberal wave has a tremendous advantage. Therefore, the massive phenomenon of migration, political violence, and disasters caused by indiscriminate extractivism in the Andes and the Amazon has also produced stories and forms of poetry that express the vision of an apocalyptic world. A clear example is the book Pukutay / Tormenta [Storm] (1982) by Eduardo Ninamango Mallqui, a Quechua poet with whose verses I conclude this chapter:

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José Antonio Mazzotti allí gritan mi nombre preguntan al viento a la lluvia por eso quisiera perderme por eso quisiera volverme piedra. (poem 1, section 2, in Noriega, Poesía quechua 437).11 there they shout my name they ask the wind to the rain therefore I would like to get lost therefore I would like to become stone.

Wanting to “get lost,” “turning stone,” refers us to the regression of fundamental symbols. Going directly from the human state to the mineral (without even stopping in the animal or vegetable world), the poem proposes, on the one hand, an inverse trip to the deities in the form of stone that became warriors to help the young prince of Cuzco (later Pachakutiq Inka) in the mythical war against the Chancas. On the other hand, it also implies the memory of sacrifice for others, to facilitate a conquest or a foundation. This is the case with Ayar Cachi, which turns into stone at the top of the Huanacaure hill so that his brother Ayar Manco (or Manco Capac) can continue with the planned foundation of Cuzco, according to the founding myth of the Ayar brothers (see Cieza, El Señorío de los Incas, Chapter 7). The stone, then, has a broad dimension, but always linked to some state of divinity. Poetry foreshadows not only the cultural disappearance of a community, but also the human species as such. There is still much to learn from these authors.

Notes 1 Some of the arguments in this first section of the chapter correspond to passages of my book Poéticas del flujo (see Mazzotti 2002). 2 As in any national invention (and Peru is no exception), the essentialist sense of a trans-historic identity constitutes an epistemological fallacy that permeates even the most elaborate academic discourses. Therefore, it would be much more risky to use the denomination of “Peruvian territory”, instead of “Andean territory”, since it should be clarified that “Peru” referred from its invention as a term in the sixteenth century to the social and administrative entity that coincided with the vast territory that occupied the same space of the ancient empire of the Incas, according to John Rowe (13), at least during the colonial period.

Andean and Amazonian displacements 165 3 Cieza adds: “porque en estos Collas, y en todos los más valles del Perú, que por ser fríos no eran tan fuertes y abundantes como los pueblos cálidos y bien proveídos, mandaron [los incas] que, como la gran serranía de los Andes comarcaba con la mayor parte de los pueblos, que de cada uno saliese cierta cantidad de indios con sus mujeres, y estos tales, puestos en las partes que sus caciques les mandaban y señalaban, labraban sus campos, en donde sembraban lo que falta en sus naturalezas, proveyendo con el fruto que cogían a sus señores o capitanes, y eran llamados mitimaes” [“because in these Collas, and in all the valleys of Peru, that because they were cold they were not as strong and abundant as the warm and well-supplied villages, they [the Incas] commanded – given that the great mountains from the Andes were so near many towns – that from each one a certain number of Indians left with their women, and these, placed in the parts that their chiefs sent them and pointed out, worked their fields, where they planted what was missing in their natures, providing with the fruit that they took to their lords or captains, and were called mitimaes”] (Cieza, Crónica del Perú 226; my translation, here and in all cases). 4 The Inca Garcilaso tells that the Incas “sacaban parte de la gente de aquella tal provincia [belicosa] (y muchas veces la sacaban toda) y la pasaban a otra provincia de las domésticas, donde viéndose por todas partes rodeados de vasallos leales y pacíficos procurasen ellos también ser leales, bajando la cerviz al yugo que ya no podían desechar" [“took part of the people from that [bellicose] province (and often took it all out) and passed it to another province of the domestic ones, where seeing themselves everywhere surrounded by loyal and peaceful vassals procured they too be loyal, lowering the cervix to the yoke that they could no longer discard”] (Comentarios reales, I, VII, I, 417). For his part, the author of the Nueva coronica mentions in his description of the “streets” or human groups in which the Inca administration divided its subjects, that “questos dichos yndios se sacaua para la batalla y guerra que tenia el Ynga y se sacaua destos ualentones yndios mytimays, estrangeros, en otras prouincias le poblaua, dándole tierras, pastos y sementeras de sobra para toda su generación, dándole muger de la misma tierra. Esto hacía por tener su rreyno seguro” [“these said indians were drawn for the battle and war that the Ynga had and he took out these courageous mytimays indians, strangers, and populated other provinces with them, giving them land, pastures and seedlings to spare for their entire generation, giving them women of the same land”] (f. 195 [197], 171). 5 The formation of the “lettered city,” however, goes through the consolidation of peninsular and European discursive models in general, both legal and artistic, with the exception of sung poetry of Quechua origin or in another language dominated by the Andean pluriglosia, as well as the representations of the collective historical memory that rectify the documented past in order to offer imaginary versions of what might well be called an indigenous poetic justice, as in the case of the representations of the death of Atahualpa (see Cornejo, Escribir en el aire Ch. 1; Millones, Actores de altura; Husson, ed., etc.). In those versions, the past is altered so as to offer favorable endings to the dominated population (Pizarro punished by the king, or even a successful Atahualpa in Cajamarca). The problem gets more complicated during the nineteenth century, since the formation (almost always failed) of the Spanish-American national states reformulates the role of literate elites, producing cases such as those of Incaism, Gauchesca literature, or the first republican Indigenismo, for example. Rama’s model has been discussed in the volume Ángel Rama y los estudios latinoamericanos (see Moraña, ed.), particularly in the essays by De La Campa, Remedi, Castro-Gómez, and Poblete (see Bibliography), and in Jean Franco’s The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City. Carlos Alonso’s “Rama y sus retoños,” is also useful for a critique of the apparent structural stagnation and the demonization of the letrado or lettered man that might be extracted from Rama’s La ciudad letrada. 6 Today, the black and mulatto population of Peru reaches nearly 3% of a total of approximately 32 million (National Census of 2017). 7 See as basic research the works of Manuel Zanutelli, La huella de Italia en el Perú, and Giovanni Bonfiglio, La presencia italiana en el Perú. From the latter author is also

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important La presencia europea en el Perú, a compilation of several authors, which includes studies on how English, Jewish, Swiss, Slavic, Italian, and Basque immigrants arrived to the country during the Republican period. John Coatsworth defines the migratory waves experienced in Latin America since the sixteenth century as four distinct “cycles of globalization.” I refer to the 1.5 million people displaced by political violence and the pauperization of the countryside during the successive governments of Belaúnde, García, and Fujimori, 1980–2000 (Migraciones internas en el Perú 43). As Hans Magnus Enzensberger points out, it is time to recognize that the so-called economic migration is also a form of political refuge from homelessness, lack of health services, education, etc., caused by political decisions in the countries of origin. In short, all immigrants are in some way political refugees. See La gran migración 53–54. A compilation of Iskonawa myths can be found in the volume Tradición oral iskonawa, edited by José Antonio Mazzotti, Roberto Zariquiey, and Carolina Rodríguez Alzza. In the Quechua original: “Chaypis / sutillata qaparispa qayanku / wayratapas, paratapas tapuspa. / Chaysi / Chinkakuyta munayman / Chaysi / rumipi kutiriyta munayman” (in Noriega, Poesía quechua 436).

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Rowe, John Howland. “El movimiento nacional inca del siglo XVIII.” En Túpac Amaru II – 1780. Alberto Flores Galindo, coordinators. Lima: Retablo de Papel, [1954] 1976. 13–66. Shukla, J., Carlos Nobre, and P. Sellers. “Amazon Deforestation and Climate Change.” Science 247, no. 4948 (March 1990): 1322–1325. Sosa, Milagros and Margreet Zwarteveen. “Exploring the Politics of Water Grabbing: The Case of Large Mining Operations in the Peruvian Andes.” Water Alternatives 5, no. 2 (2012): 360–375. Torres, Fidel. Minería metálica bajo el Niño en Piura: injustificado riesgo para su vida y desarrollo. Piura: Oxibem, 2003. Vega, Inca Garcilaso de la. Primera Parte de los Comentarios reales. Lisboa: Imprenta de Pedro Craasbeck, 1609. Watanabe, José, Amelia Morimoto and Óscar Chambi. La memoria del ojo. Cien años de presencia japonesa en el Perú. Lima: Fondo Editorial del Congreso del Perú, 1999. Zanutelli, Manuel. La huella de Italia en el Perú. Lima: Fondo Editorial del Congreso del Perú, 2001.

13 Language of space Politics of indigenous people removal and the ethnopolitics of resistance: The post-colonial diaspora1 Stefano Varese The Oaxaca paradigm The transnational migration of indigenous people from the Mexican state of Oaxaca to the United States has been increasing at a stable rate since the expansion of globalization at the end of the 1970s. In Mexico, globalization reveals itself through constitutional and institutional state reforms that imply the progressive dismantling of the welfare state, growing pressure toward privatization of the productive infrastructure and the lands of “social interest” (established by the 1917 Agrarian Reform), lands of indigenous communities and ejidos, the annulment of government agricultural credits, and the radical shrinking of the state’s role in rural development. One of the expected results of these state reforms and of their impact on indigenous and rural sectors is the commoditization of lands, territories, and communal resources through the allure of its privatization and sale. Since the reform of article 27 of the Constitution of Mexico and its political and economic implementation beginning in 1997, however, the expected process of privatization and sale of indigenous and rural lands has not come about. The Maya Zapatista insurgency of 1994 sent the clear and loud message that the indigenous people of Mexico (and Latin America) were ready to defend their sovereignty with armed resistance. The indigenous communities of Oaxaca have responded to the economic, political, and structural attacks by holding on even more tightly to communal property and reaffirming their communal citizenship, which is founded on the collective possession and administration of the territory and the right to exercise communal jurisdiction over it. How to explain then that in the face of these renewed attacks on indigenous lands and resources over the many decades, there has been an increase in indigenous rural-urban and transnational migration? Can we assume that collective control over the territory is becoming weaker and more vulnerable because of these massive outgoing movements of indigenous people? On the contrary, it seems that migration is increasingly becoming part of community’s survival strategy, which does not imply the structural abandonment of the territory or a permanent deterritorialization of the migrants. The temporary absences of indigenous transnational migrants seem to reinforce, instead, the sense of territoriality and

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communal-territorial citizenship as much in the migrants as in those that remain behind. There are no obvious indications that the transnational migration is causing the territorial-structural dissolution of the community. This new “distant belonging” of individual and social identity is a hypothesis that should be empirically investigated. Nevertheless, all qualitative approaches to this issue indicate that transnational migrants remain strongly attached to their community and tend to practice circular migration in seasonal cycles tightly intertwined with agricultural and ceremonial activities that take place in the sending community. The Law on the Rights of the Indigenous Peoples and Communities of the State of Oaxaca (Decree N. 266 of July 17th, 1998) is proof of the success of the indigenous peoples’ persistent struggle to maintain or regain control over their territory and resources, as well as their full jurisdictional powers. The law on territorial protection and indigenous self-determination was achieved as a result of the organized political struggle of the indigenous communities and people during a period in which the level of migration to the United States and to the urban and agro-industrial zones of Mexico was in full expansion (Varese, Witness to Sovereignty 239–240).

The indigenous community as a place in the universe Any discussion on indigenous communities and the territorial basis of their sovereignty raises some old sociological questions regarding the definition and scope of community, as well as more recent debates on the function of location/ placement in the social construction of ethnic identity. The classic sociological distinction put forward by F. Tönnies between Gemeinschaft (the community of close, intimate relationships, where kinship, a bound and shared territory, and a common culture dominate the social relations) and Gesellschaft (translated in English as “society,” where relationships are impersonal, contractual, transitory, and calculative rather than affective) has been enriched by British anthropologist Peter Worsley, who has emphasized locality as a constitutive condition of any definitional undertaking. Even for those contemporary communities whose members are scattered around the world and are defined as a type of relationship where communality is expressed as a sense of shared identity rather than a localized social system, the question of locality and spatial location of “community members” may rise time and again as an organizational and political challenge (the Jewish community comes to mind) (Worsley 238–245).2 The preeminent role of space/land/territory in communal definition is particularly true in the case of the indigenous people of Latin America. For the 50 or so millions indigenous people (Psacharopoulos and Patrinos; Varese, Think Locally), belonging to more than 600 major ethnolinguistic groups, living in thousands of rural communities spread throughout all sort of geographical and environmental zones, issues of territory, land, resources, nature, and the world are intrinsically tied to the cultural conception and social practice of community. The community is in the first place the village, the geographical space where one was born or where one’s parents and ancestors were born and are buried.

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This communal space with names, stories, history, and cosmological references is where the individual and collective identity is constructed in a tight web of meanings expressed in a specific ethnic language or in a local variety of the national language. It is essential to recognize that for indigenous people, the territorial, spatial, locational, and land issues remain at the core of any discussion about meanings of community, ethnicity and politics of cultural identity, cultural reproduction, and autonomy. Consequently, I am addressing my commentaries to the centrality of the notions and practices of space jurisdiction and cultural jurisdiction in indigenous communities as well as the related issues of intellectual sovereignty and epistemological autonomy, which, as I have intended to demonstrate somewhere else, are a set of tightly interwoven questions (Varese, Local Epistemologies). Recently, the question of Latin American indigenous people’s land/territory has been revisited by anthropologists Díaz Polanco, Hale, and Kearney, “Borders and Boundaries,” and by Kearney and Varese, 14Reconceptualizing the Peasantry, with a broader more ethnopolitical approach and a less peasant productivist focus, which has been the dominant mode of study of Latin American indigenous communities since the founding analyses of K. Marx and V. I. Lenin., A.V. Chayanov, J.C. Mariátegui, T. Shanin, and the analytical school initiated by E. Wolf (Sons of the Shaking Earth and Peasants). During at least the last eight decades, indigenous people of Latin America have been treated by social scientists as peasants, that is to say that they have been put symbolically in the proverbial “sack of potatoes” of K. Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, and have become thus prey of convoluted debates between economic theorists and anthropologists, revolutionaries, and developmentalists. Questions about the cultural and economic autonomy of peasantry, the independent nature of their mode of production, their crucial or marginal role in peripheral capitalism, and the immanent or transitional character of their historical presence have obscured other important cultural and political characteristics of the indigenous people such as their “long historical duration” (in a Braudelian sense) as “autonomous” ethnic entities that have survived and reproduced themselves during millennia throughout different larger social formations (precolonial and colonial states, and contemporary republican nation-states of all political coloring). It is well known that the extreme civilizational and ethnic diversity of precolonial Native America was reduced by European colonialism to the homogenized and generic sub-alternity of “indios” for purpose of labor control and ideological and political domination. The process produced ruralization, “campesinización”/ peasantization of the Indians but also proletarization (through labor in mining, “obrajes” or sweatshops, haciendas, and plantations) and the concurrent phenomena of Indian urbanization. These new multiple indigenous ethnoses that reconfigured themselves throughout the last five centuries of colonial and neocolonial occupation (and that we could define as permanent processes of ethnogenesis) have a series of cultural and social characteristics that understanding goes well beyond limited, if not simplistic, economic analyses framed in terms of EuroAmerican and Eurocentric perspectives and interests.

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It is obvious, for instance, that the Formalist-Substantivist debate of the early 1960s about precapitalist societies, the Neoclassical-Marxist ongoing dispute about Third World rural development/revolution, and even the more updated contributions of the “Moral Economy” a la James Scott (The Moral Economy and Weapons of the Weak) and “The Rational Peasant” á la Samuel Popkin are all analytical approaches that privilege a fundamentally Western (and philosophically Enlightened) conception of individual social life and economy: “value” as determined by labor and exchange is at the ethical center of life in civilized society.3 The axis around which the whole society rotates is production of value for exchange. The language of this system is the language of individualism, and increasingly the language of profit; its ethos, its moral code is, since Max Weber told us in 1905, the spirit of capitalism. The cultural language of this system is also spatially disembodied, it is valid and performable anywhere, in any deterritorialized space. Increasingly, the space of the “exchange value” is uprooted, ungrounded, ethereal, or “cyberial” as Arturo Escobar would say. Indigenous communities and peoples scrutinized with this cultural lens make very little sense. In fact, this type of analysis constitutes a splendid instrument for increasing the frustration of economists, social scientists, and institutions involved in indigenous people’ development. An indigenous epistemological and axiological approach to the relation between individual and society uses instead, to paraphrase Lakota scholar Elisabeth CookLynn, the “language of place”: a language embedded in the locality, in the concrete space where culture is grounded and reproduced in a familiar landscape where naming of things, space, objects, plants, animals, living people, and the dead, the underworld, and the celestial infinity evoke the total cosmic web as an awesome and mysterious social and divine construction. The indigenous cultural language is constructed around a few principles and a cultural logic or a cultural topology that privileges diversity and heterogeneity over homogeneity, eclecticism over dogma, and multiplicity over bipolarity. This is why a paradigmatic shift that accentuates “topos” rather than “logos” is needed to understand indigenous people. This is also why I believe that the beauty of our particular discipline, our intellectual endeavor, is that it does not solve all mysteries: it announces them.

The local and the global One initial central idea that needs to be clarified is that globalization, for the indigenous communities, is not a new political, economic, and cultural phenomenon, but rather a five-century old arrangement of the world imposed by Europe and Euro-America upon the multiplicity of local social and cultural expressions as a permanent attempt to configure and reconfigure people and resources into an acceptable and naturalized order of things easily exploitable. A corollary of this remark is that the analytical frame for understanding the local people of this continent – the indigenous people in all their various localized/communal/territorial expressions, who since the sixteenth century have succumbed under Euro-American expansionism – must be a global and a hemispheric one.

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The local (each indigenous people, culture, ethnohistorical formation) acquires full meaning as long as it is perceived as dialectically constructed within the structure and configuration of colonial and neocolonial power, which since its inception manifested itself as a program of global domination. As a consequence, while the theoretical need for a global approach to the study of indigenous people has its foundations on the logic of the political economy of power (fundamentally the understanding of the role played by indigenous people’s labor, culture, science, and technologies in the monumental accumulation of wealth and power of the Euro-American élites), the need for a hemispheric approach is based on the recognition that the Native People of the Americas in all their cultural diversity share and are part of a common and unique civilization. The most obvious analogy that can be made to illustrate this statement is one drawn out of the cultural history of Europe and the Mediterranean area where many local cultures developed historically within one civilizational matrix (S. Amin). In the Americas, like in the Mediterranean, many peoples and many cultures shared one civilizational unity grounded in millennia of codevelopment. I would like to expand on this idea of unity and plurality, commonality and diversity among indigenous people by providing some observations with a few strokes of a broad ethnohistorical brush. While polyculture (the practice of biodiversity in agricultural production) seems to be found prevalently in the tropical and subtropical regions of the world, it is among the indigenous people of the Americas of different and varied ecosystems where this technology has reached an astounding level of refinement. The Andean and Amazonian chacra and conuco, the Mesoamerican milpa, and the “three sisters” or “sacred triad” of Eastern and Central North America and the South West constitute some of the expressions of a common indigenous conception, throughout thousands of miles and hundreds if not thousands of ethnic groups and cultures. This conception holds that concentrating, nourishing, and developing diversity in the reduced space of human agricultural intervention, as well as in the larger space of economic activity of the entire group, is the most appropriate way of dealing with land, water, animal, botanical, and “resources” conservation, and in general with the preservation and reproduction of the environment and the nurturing of nature. Clearly, Native American agricultural biodiversity and environmental management are millennial practices and sciences that resulted from early intentional and planned domestication of plants such as corn, beans, squash, chiles, potato, manihot, sweet potato, amaranth, peanuts, coca, tomato, avocado, tobacco, and thousands of other cultigens and semi-domesticated plants. What needs to be pointed out is that the extreme variety of indigenous cultigens and semi-domesticated plants is matched by an equally diverse and multiple use of the environment and a systematic cultural preoccupation for maintaining and increasing the diversity of the biosphere. Polyculture and the intentional maintenance of biodiversity are historical realities, but also metaphors of the indigenous people’s cultural gravitation toward diversity rather than homogeneity, eclecticism rather than dogma. Polyculture, the nurturing of biodiversity, and the multiple use of the environment seem to constitute the crucial conception of what has been called by James

174 Stefano Varese Scott (Scott 1976) the “moral economy” of peasants-indigenous people. This axial cultural notion, which operates along the “principle of diversity,” accompanies and shapes the whole cosmology of innumerable Amerindian societies that place at the center of the universe not the man (the anthropocentric, patriarchal, dominant character of both the sacred and secular history of Euro-America) but rather diversity itself expressed in the multiplicity of deities with their polymorphic characteristics and at times contradictory functions. The ancient Mesoamerican Quetzalcoatl is serpent, bird, and human at the same time. He is historical cultural hero on his way back to repossess the stolen Indian world and he is Morning Star. He is also the fragile and vulnerable humanistic holy principle that privileges the sacrifice to the gods of jades and butterflies instead of human offerings. He certainly does not stand at the center of the Mesoamerican Indian cosmologies because there is no center but rather an intricate polyphony of symbols and values, a “spiritual polyculture,” a “sacred milpa,” a “holy chacra,” and an infinite domain for the encounter and interaction of diversity. The Biblical and Judeo-Christian foundations of the anthropocentric Mediterranean and Euro-American worldview that establishes a confrontational relation between humans and nature, men and animals, forests, mountains, jungles, and deserts have been analyzed thoroughly by recent studies (Amin and Sale, among others). This representation of the world and the resulting human positioning in it demands the homogenization of the surroundings and of nature in order to control, subjugate, and exploit both. Even Marxism, as the secular revolutionary version of the Judeo-Christian utopian thought, pays homage to this dichotomous view of the world where humans are separated from the rest of nature and struggling to control it. Recently James C. Scott has explored extensively the cultural obsession of homogenization in societies ruled by élite classes engaged in statebuilding projects. The simplification, and thus the legibility and possibility of administrative manipulation, of nature and society is a sine qua non condition of every political system that aims at centralization and concentration of power and the concomitant subjugation of local autonomy and epistemological sovereignty. Precolonial indigenous states such the Mexica-Tenochtla, the Mixtecs, the Zapotecs, the Maya or the Inca, just to mention the most renowned, do not show indications of having had interest in homogenizing the occupied natural and social space. In fact, it has been well documented that precolonial indigenous tributary states practiced a sort of cultural, ideological, and spiritual inclusive eclecticism that contributed to the constant growth and increasing complexity of their multicultural societies (Clendinnen and Murra). In contrast to Euro-American anthropocentrism, the indigenous people of the Americas for millennia seem to have constructed cosmos-centric and polycentric cosmologies based on the logic of diversity and the logic of reciprocity. A diverse cosmos, in which no center is privileged, no singularity is hegemonic. A world that is constantly enriched by the interaction of each of its elements, even those that are antithetical, requires a moral code (a customary code of behavior) based on the logic of reciprocity. Whatever is taken has to be returned in similar and comparable “value.” Whatever I receive (good, gift, service, resource) I will

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have to reciprocate at some point with similar and comparable value. What I take from Earth has to be returned, what I give to Earth or to the gods or my human counterparts will be given back to me. Sociologist of religion, G. Van Der Leeuw synthesized splendidly many decades ago this civilizational logic with the Latin formula: “Do ut possis dare,” “I give so that you can give.” It would be simplistic and reductionist to argue that this whole millennial civilizational proposition of the indigenous people of the Americas could be condensed in the descriptive equivalence that these are “agrocentric societies” that have historically favored agricultural development at the expense of other areas of social and cultural growth. I am suggesting, instead, that both the principles of diversity and the principle of reciprocity have been and are present in the economic, social, political, and cultural life of indigenous societies that have established their ethnic distinctiveness on foraging activities (gathering, hunting, and fishing), or in more recent colonial and neocolonial times in a “mixed” economy that has combined wage labor, petty mercantile activities, and sub-subsistence horticulture. At the end of thousands of year of evolvement and their incorporation into social and cultural formations that advance opposite values, the majority of indigenous people of the Americas that have not been totally destroyed by the dominant national societies (and their capitalist weltanschauung) are still struggling to live their social lives guided by these principles. Obviously, for contemporary indigenous people, life in the midst of a permanent contradiction between the “culture of use value,” guided by the logic of diversity and reciprocity, and the “culture of exchange value,” guided by the logic of homogenization and individualistic profit, is fraught with tremendous ambiguities and conflicts. This tension between two logics – two sets of principles, which can be summarized as culture of economy of use and culture of economy of profit – characterizes the social, economic, and cultural life of the great majority of indigenous people and communities of Latin America. The acrid polemics that for decades have torn apart Substantivists and Formalists, Marxists and neoclassical economists, and that are now confronting the Mayan Zapatistas of Chiapas with neoliberal bureaucrats turned into aspirant bankers, reveal at a magnified scale the degree of penetration of capitalist weltanschauung into every interstice of world’s societies. There are currently in the United States thousands of indigenous migrants from Latin America, and especially from Mexico. For transnational Indian migrants who are coming from Mexico and Central and South America to the United States, the issue of “communal citizenship” is of vital importance. Indian migrants can spend many years as farm workers or cooks in California and keep their social position within their home community in Mexico as long as they contribute annually with the communal well-being by participating in the ceremonies of reciprocity. Reciprocity may consist in performing different annual social and political tasks, sponsoring one of the Patron Saint “fiestas,” participating routinely in communal public service (tequio or faena in Mexico, minga in the Andes) or carrying out civic responsibilities within the organization of the community (the Cargo System). None of these activities is paid for, on the contrary each activity and

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commitment may cost a small fortune to the community’s member. Why does a Mixtec or Chinantec or Zapotec living in California feel obliged to return to his/her community in the Southern state of Oaxaca to perform an onerous, burdensome, and expensive duty? What is at issue here is the moral strength of the collective demand of being an active participant in the life of one’s own community. Indian communal citizenship has to be renewed and nurtured by its carrier through a series of ritualized acts and social functions that are based on the logic of reciprocity. Each member of the indigenous community is aware of the link that exists within all its members and wants to ensure that everyone else recognizes his/her contributions to the well-being of the collective body. Here the logic of reciprocity overrules the opposite logic of individualism and accumulation/ profit that leads and regulates social life outside the indigenous community. There are some central questions that require further analysis: How much of these indigenous civilizational principles and logic are still present in contemporary indigenous peoples? How has the expansion of capitalist economy and worldview affected the various indigenous people? Can we naively assume the existence of numerous indigenous people-communities relatively unadulterated by the opposite logic of individualism, profit, commoditization, and primacy of “exchange value” over “use value”? Let us assume the hypothesis that the thousands of indigenous communities of Latin America (40 to 60/70 million indigenous people and hundreds of ethnolinguistic groups) can be divided in the following schematic typology: (1) agrarianpeasant communities, increasingly relying on external wage labor and circular migration; (2) indigenous communities of horticulturists who rely still very much on foraging, hunting, and gathering; and (3) proletarianized rural and urban indigenous people who rely mostly on wage labor at the level of sub-employment and/ or temporary employment. Clearly, a class analysis must be introduced in this typology to disclose the presence, in most of the indigenous ethnic people, of a small élite of intelligentsia and professionals, a petty bourgeoisie linked in most cases to nation-state bureaucracy and services, and in some cases of a flourishing bourgeoisie (some clear examples are to be found among the Isthmus Zapotecs of Mexico, and the Guajiro of Venezuela). How did the process of transformation of the indigenous people take place during the last few centuries? and how are the transformations produced today by the globalization and the induced transnational migration and diaspora affecting the indigenous people’s relation to their territory, their homeland? Obviously, these are questions that would require much more space and time that the one I have in this opportunity. I postulate, nevertheless, that a historical analysis within a Ferdinand Braudel’s perspective of the “Longue Durée”/Long Duration is absolutely indispensable if we are to understand not the “eventful history” but the more permanent cultural and social characteristics of indigenous societies. As we consider indigenous people, we are looking at millennia of accumulated history, trends, cultural characteristics that have survived and have adapted to many radical, social, and economic changes occurred through millennia of the

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precolonial time, centuries of colonialism-imperialism (which produced fragmented mosaics of territorialized “Indian community,” the early Indian diaspora, and Indian proletariat), more than one century of nationalism (which accentuated the expansion and penetration of capitalist market in indigenous territories), and finally, a few more decades of the transnationalism and globalization (which is inducing Indian neo-diaspora, transnational migration, and processes of cyclical deterritorialization). In this schematic chronology, I think it is important to emphasize the understanding of formative period of millennia of pre-Colombian, pre-European, preinvasion, preconquest, or “independent indigenous evolvement” as that of construction of polycentric cosmology as well as polycentric social practice that Eurocentrism would later call polytheism and misinterpret by confusing diversity with chaos and disorder. This is the complex of bio-cultural diversity that has been attributed by anthropologists to early indigenous social formation of foragers, hunters and gatherers, horticulturists, and agrarian societies that evolved in the tropics. Is biodiversity an exclusive function of the tropics? It is evident that there is more biodiversity in subtropical and tropical zones; however, even in temperate climates and sub-arctic regions, biodiversity seems to be the central characteristic of indigenous people’s culture. Reciprocity is the associated and homologous social and cultural principle of biodiversity. A principle that supports the whole logic of social interaction as well as the whole moral of cosmic transactions, those arrangements that take place between humans and the rest of the tangible and intangible universe. American Indian languages are repositories of these intellectual and practical constructions and hundreds of terms can be found in Amerindian semantic fields that refer to reciprocal social and cosmic transactions. The Zapotec guzún y guelaguetza, the Nahuatl tequistl, tequio, the Quechua mit’a, ayni, and the Ashaninca ayumparii are only some examples of terms that refer to elaborate cultural institutions of diversity and reciprocity. Even in historical societies that were organized hierarchically in social classes like those of Mesoamerica and Andes, the logic of reciprocity was at the basis of every exchange of goods, services, labor, tributes, and gifts. The tributary system was based on the principle of reciprocity, which could be symmetrical, asymmetrical, and/or differed. In any case, complementarity is the logical and practical concurrent principle of diversity and reciprocity that allowed, for instance, the Andean peoples to build the elaborate and monumental agroecological system based on the combined vertical use of different ecosystems or “ecological floors” distributed at different altitudes of the Andes (Murra, and Dollfus). In the case of the Amazon region, a similar principle made it possible for indigenous people to establish a macro-system of horizontal complementarity in a large geographical area in which scarce and scattered resources such as salt, stone axes, or the hunting poison “curare” could be circulated and exchanged by larger numbers of people separated by thousands of miles (Varese, “Los grupos etnolingüísticos”). Mesoamerica expressed the same principles of reciprocity, diversity, and complementarity through the “solar market system,” which articulates the people of numerous and diverse villages and regions in

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periodical encounters for the exchange of goods, ideas, ceremonies, and culture (Wolf).

Spatial jurisdiction and the right to remain home Indigenous communities, throughout the Americas, are an essential component of civil society. In fact, indigenous citizens/communities are one of the most critical elements of civil society since they are the permanent testimony of the strength and endurance of alternative and diverse cultures and civilizational projects. They are the evidence that even the most oppressed and exploited sector of civil society can enrich the political counterculture and the popular counter-hegemonic social project. The political society, on the other hand, has been a banned territory for indigenous people in colonial and neocolonial situations. This political territory is where the rules of the game are established, where rewards and punishments are determined, where the hegemonic societal vision is generated and imposed as the exclusive social truth. It is within this polar and dialectical context that the issue of indigenous sovereignty and the prerogative of exercising territorial jurisdiction must be analyzed, especially in relation to the protection mechanisms that must be in place to safeguard the powerless from the powerful. It is obvious that the fundamental conditions for the full exercise of indigenous sovereignty lay, in the first instance, in the collective ownership of the land/territory and jurisdictional control over that territory/land. Political self-determination, social autonomy, and economic independence are the requirements of indigenous sovereignty and full jurisdiction. As far as I know, there are, in Latin America, only a few clear-cut cases of state legislation that recognize indigenous territorial jurisdiction, one is the Bill of Rights of the Indigenous People and Communities of the State of Oaxaca, Mexico (enacted by the State Congress in June 1998). This law resulted from the struggle of indigenous organizations and the Oaxaca State government’s preoccupation after de Maya Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas (1994). The Organization of American States (OAS) during its 95th Regular Session of February 1997 proposed the American Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, in which the rights to self-government and the application of indigenous legal system within their territories is recognized and recommended to nation-states. The OAS Declaration cannot be enforced nor can the International Labor Office (ILO) Covenant 169, even when ratified by various governments of Latin America. It is only under specific national legislation (or State legislation in case of countries with federal governments like Mexico) that indigenous communal-territorial titles can be given with the clause that the title includes community jurisdiction.4 A major question remains: What political institution (national, international, global) is accountable for the safeguard of the indigenous people rights to sovereignty? The neo/post-colonial nation-states in Latin America were built on the ethnic-assimilationist assumption and the explicit goal of homogenizing all the citizens included within their boundaries in one national culture, one national language. Two hundred years of failed attempts have modified some of the tenets

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of the Latin American nation-state. Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, and Bolivia are beginning to rethink their Constitutions, opening some space for a new more inclusive and pluralistic definition of the nation-state that allows for the expression of ethnic diversity within the nation and its institutions. The challenge to the implementation by the nation-state of policies of multiethnicity is coming now from the increasing trend of globalization and its manifestation at the national level: the dismantling of the welfare state, the growing political intrusion of transnational corporate interests, and the diminished accountability of national and local government vis-á-vis its multiethnic communities. As the nation-state is reconfiguring itself to finally accept the multicultural composition of the various peoples that form the nation, the same state is being transformed and minimized in its protective role to serve the interests of a neoliberal global project that requires uncontrolled, de-regulated, subservient national administrations with no power to protect and safeguard the diverse communities and citizens of the country. I want to make it clear that the dismantling of the protective state does not mean the reduction of its repressive apparatus, in fact this may even increase, sometimes through the privatization of police force and even the army. At this point of the journey, it seems that the defense of the indigenous peoples’ rights is left to themselves and to broad-based pan-indigenous alliances with the national and “global civil society.” That “globalization from below” (mentioned by international legal expert Richard Falk), which is emerging with increasing force in grassroots movements and organizations in the northern hemisphere but also, once more, with revolutionary strength in what used to be the periphery or the Global South, is probably the new scenario of indigenous organized resistance. The nation-states – and their international political organizations such as the UN or financial organizations such as the WB, the IMF, the WTO, etc. – have systematically failed to respond to indigenous peoples’ historical claims of territorial recognition and their demands for stricter enforcement of human, political, and cultural rights. After many years of debates at the UN, within the Sub-commission for the Prevention of Discrimination and the Protection of Minorities, on October 28, 1994, the indigenous peoples presented the Resolution 1.994/45 Project of United Nations Declaration on the Rights of the Indigenous Peoples. In yet another demonstration of their unwillingness to recognize any specific cultural rights and degrees of autonomy for the indigenous peoples, the English-speaking nation-states (United States, Australia, New Zealand and, until recently, Canada) have rejected the project and have not ratified the ILO Covenant 169 for the protection of the human and political rights of indigenous peoples. The time seems to be appropriate, and some of the signs are visible, for the indigenous peoples of the Americas and the world (all the stateless peoples) to begin to organize a global united indigenous people organization that can counterbalance the authoritarian international political society with a democratic and multiethnic civil society that represents, defends, and secures indigenous sovereignty. In a world where outgoing migration or forced expulsion from the land of the community and the commons seems to be the alternative of choice of dysfunctional and absentee governments, the right to stay put, to remain in the land of

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the ancestors, has to be protected and defended as the most precious possession of indigenous peoples for their own survival as testimony of millennia of civilizational promise.

Notes 1 This chapter is based on previous published and unpublished works in which I dealt with themes of territoriality, ethnic/cultural identity, forced removal of indigenous peoples, migrations, and ethnopolitical reconfigurations; see Stefano Varese “Identidad y destierro”; Pueblos indios. Soberanía y globalismo; “The Territorial Roots of Latin American Indigenous Peoples”; Stefano Varese y Sylvia Escárcega, La ruta mixteca; and Varese, Witness to Sovereignty. 2 See also Jameson, and especially Appadurai. 3 This is the line of thought established by Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) and followed by Karl Marx’s Capital (1867–1894). 4 There are in Latin America a series of legislative initiatives that are aiming at correcting the long-standing tradition of Eurocentric legal system that tends to exclude people and communities that are perceived as alien and inferior. Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia are at the forefront of some of these reformist initiatives that are supported – if not promoted – by the United Nations, the International Labor Office, and in a few cases even by the Organization of American States and legally enforced – in some cases – by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

Bibliography Albers, Patricia and Jeanne Kay. “Sharing the Land: A Study in American Indian Territoriality”. In Geography of Northamerican Indians. T.E.R.a.T.G. Moore, ed. Boulder: Westview Press, 1987. Amin, Samir. Eurocentrism. New York: Monthly Review, 1989. Appadurai, Arjun. ”Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology”. Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, R. G. Fox, ed. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1991. Chayanov, A.V. The Theory of the Peasant Economy. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986. Clendinnen, Inga. Aztecs: An Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Díaz Polanco, Héctor. La Autonomía de los Pueblos Indigenas. México: Siglo XXI Editores, 1991. Dollfus, Olivier. El reto del espacio andino. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1981. Escobar, Arturo. Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. Hale, Charles R. Resistance and Contradiction: Miskitu Indians and the Nicaraguan State, 1894–1987. Stanford: Stanforde University Press, 1994. Hale, Charles R. “De la militancia indígena a la conciencia multiétnica: los desafíos de la autonomía en la Costa Atlántica de Nicaragua”. Etnicidad y Derechos Indígenas. S. Varese, ed. Quito: Ediciones Abya Yala, 1995. Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”. New Left Review 146 (1984): 53–92.

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Jary, David and Julia Jery. The Harper Collins Dictionary of Sociology. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991. Kearney, Michael. “Border and Boundaries of State and Self at the End of the Empire”. Journal of Historical Sociology 4, no. 1 (1991): 52–74. Kearney, Michael. Reconceptualizing the Peasantry. Boulder: Westview Press, 1996. Kearney, Michael and Stefano Varese. “Latin America’s Indigenous Peoples Today: Changing Identities and Forms of Resistance in Global Context”. Capital, Power and Inequality in Latin America. R.H.a.S. Halebsky, ed. Boulder: Westview Press, 1995. Lenin, V.I. The Development of Capitalism in Russia: The Process of Formation of a Home Market for Large-Scale Industry. Moscow, 1899. Mariátegui, José Carlos. Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana. Lima: Biblioteca Amauta, 1928. Marx, Karl. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. New York: International Publishers, 1963. Murra, John V. Formaciones Económicas y Politicas del Mundo Andino. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos. 1978. Popkin, Samuel. The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1979. Psacharopoulos, George and Harry Anthony Patrinos, eds. Indigenous People and Poverty in Latin America. An Empirical Analysis. Washington, DC: The World Bank, 1994. Sale, Kirkpatrick. The Conquest of Paradise. Cristopher Columbus and the Colombian Legacy. New York: The Penguin Book, 1991. Scott, James. The Moral Economy of the Peasants: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976. Scott, James. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. Scott, James. Seeing Like a State. How Certain Schemes to Improve Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Shanin, Theodor, ed. Defining Peasants: Essays Concerning Ruralo Societies. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990. Stefano, Varese and Sylvia Escárcega. “Identidad y destierro: los pueblos indígenas ante la globalización.” en Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, Año XXIII, LimaBerkeley 2do. Semestre de 1997, 19–35. Stefano, Varese and Sylvia Escárcega. Local Epistemologies in the Age of Globalization. Chicago, IL: American Anthropological Association 98th Annual Meeting, Society for Latin American Anthropology, 1999. Stefano, Varese and Sylvia Escárcega. “The Territorial Roots of Latin American Indigenous Peoples. ‘Movement for Sovereignty’”. HAGAR. International Social Science Review 2, no. 2 (2001): 201–217. Stefano, Varese and Sylvia Escárcega (Coordinators). La ruta mixteca. El impacto etnopolítico de la migración transnacional en los pueblos indígenas de México. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2004. Stefano, Varese and Sylvia Escárcega. Witness to Sovereignty. Essays on the Indian Movement in Latin America. Copenhagen: International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs-IWGIA, 2006. Tönnies, F. Community and Society. London: Routledge, 1955. Van Der Leeuw, G. La Religion dans son essence et ses manifestations. Paris: Payot, 1955. Varese, Stefano. “Los Grupos Etno-Lingüísticos de la Selva Andina”. América Latina y sus Lenguas Indigenas. B. Pottier, Ed. Caracas: Monte Avila Editores. 1983.

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Varese, Stefano. “Cultural Development in Ethnic Groups: Anthropological Explorations in Education”. International Social Science Journal, UNESCO XXXVII (1985): 201–216. Varese, Stefano. “Think Locally, Act Globally. Report of the Americas”. NACLA XXV (1991): 3. Varese, Stefano (Coordinador). Pueblos indios, soberanía y globalismo. Quito: Biblioteca Abya Ayala, 1996. Varese, Stefano. “The Territorial Roots of Latin American Indigenous Peoples’ Movements for Sovereignty”. HAGAR – International Social Science Review 2, no. 2 (2001): 201–217. Varese, Stefano. La Sal de los Cerros. Lima: Fondo Editorial del Congreso del Perú, 2006. Varese, Stefano. Witness to Sovereignty. Essays on the Indian Movement in Latin America. Copenhagen: International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs-IWGIA, 2006. Wolf, Eric R. Sons of the Shaking Earth. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959. Wolf, Eric R. Peasants. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966. Worsley, Peter et al. The New Introducing Sociology. New York: Penguin Books. 1987.

14 From genocide to Hieleras The never-ending Maya genocide Arturo Arias

In her book Global Indios, historian Nancy van Deusen explains what it meant to be diasporic for the heterogenous populations essentialized as “indios” in the early 16th century. Van Deusen highlights slavery in the European expansion. She describes a woman branded with the phrase “free as long as she serves her master” on her arm. Another depicts the face of a woman branded with the words “slave of the jurado Diego López of Sevilla.” These examples provide evidence of the first instance when Indigenous subjects were forced to leave their life world. Van Deusen proves how physical dislocation began as early as 1502 and was common by the 1520s (67), crushing their identities. Prior to the Spanish arrival, Mesoamerican sense of belonging was highly localized. Yet beyond commerce, scribes, astronomers, and priests moved regularly among cosmopolitan cities with multiethnic and multilingual populations. Once across the Atlantic and forcefully separated from their former sense of self, they felt how they transitioned from being selves to becoming objects. This traumatic experience lingers as a phantasmatic echo in present-day’s news from the US-Mexico border. Images show small bodies squeezed into cramped spaces. A high number of them are Indigenous children speaking neither English nor Spanish. Migrants call them hieleras. This means a cooler or an ice box. The name alludes to the frigid tiny rooms where these children are forced to sleep on concrete floors. Showers, soap, and medicines are lacking. They resemble those in which their ancestors made the reverse Atlantic passage in the 16th century going from West to East, unlike Africans moving in the opposite direction a century later. Now and then, they were targeted for slavery or elimination. When enslaved in Spain, a vast ocean separated them from home. Now it is the Sonoran deserts. Otherwise, little has changed in the last 500 years. The travails of racialized migrants, in asymmetric relations of power to white that dominate global capitalism, is a never-ending horror scene. Their present situation is the living proof that colonialism, imperialism, and immigration remain integral parts of the same structure, and have changed little since the Spaniards invaded Abiayala (Latin America),1 in the 16th century. Global powers configured the geo-social construct of European colonialism that morphed in time into industrial capitalism, and more recently became a neoliberal globalized system. As scholars Aníbal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein stated 30 years ago,

184 Arturo Arias “there could not have been a capitalist world-economy without the Americas” (“Americanity as a Concept,” 449). Slavery was central to European expansion. Colonialism deployed race as its matrix of power. The modes of production of global capitalism remains organized by this racial mold since the 16th century. W. E. B. Du Bois claimed already in 1935 that industrialized societies were constituted through racialization. Frantz Fanon explained colonization’s dehumanizing effects 60 years ago. More recently, Latin American scholars, like Walter Mignolo, Aníbal Quijano, or Enrique Dussel, and Indigenous intellectuals like Maya sociologists Aura Cumes and Edgar Esquit, have underscored the relationship of colonialism, imperialism, and immigration as a constitutive historical process resulting from the 16th-century codification of racial difference that subalternized Indigenous nations. For Cumes and Esquit, first nations are still struggling to be rid of colonialism. Nineteenth-century independence benefitted only Westernized Criollo and Mestizo populations. Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez examined early 21st-century waves of Middle Eastern, Asian and African migrants to Europe, labeling this phenomenon the coloniality of migration. Gutiérrez Rodríguez placed the asylum-migration nexus in the same historical juncture as the one developed by scholars previously cited. She labels Western neo-liberal globalization as “racial capitalism.” And yet, we still must explain why economically deprived subjects of color migrate to the wealthier nations of the Global North. In the Trump years, most asylum seekers are of Guatemalan Maya origin. I will address why this happens, by tracing the historical arch that unites the 1520s catastrophe with the present juncture. For many Westerncentered thinkers, it seems idiotic to explain a present-day crisis with historical issues. Yet the past continually impinges on the present for most colonized populations of the global South. Harry Harootunian calls it an entangled labyrinth embedded in their lived experience (156), adding they “do not pass into pasts but remain within each present as constituent components”. For Mayas, this entanglement, interlocking events that took place 500 years ago with the present, constitutes a genealogy of dehumanization in which the past is not even past, but an integral part of the present, and of the immediate future. In the elaboration of this analysis I reconfigure categories like agency, to account for the complexity of the Maya life world. This heritage needs an alternative reconstruction to explain their absence in grand narratives of Western history. Mayas embody those traumas lingering for centuries even when unspoken. I borrow the use of “life world” from Achille Mbembe’s analysis of the postcolony to configure an uncanny locale where these subjects’ existence unfolds, structured by ontologies determining a singular mode of communal behavior. Concerning agency, professor of Africana Studies Neil Roberts claims freedom should be understood within the liminal and transitional space of slave escape, where agency becomes a form of perpetual flight. “Slavery and freedom are intertwined and interdependent terms” he adds (4), placing the concept within the intersection of race, sovereignty, colonialism, and freedom. Roberts borrowed this category from the Caribbean cimarrón experience of runaway slaves. The

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term is from Martinican poet Aimé Césaire (1913–2008).2 The slave experience evidences the incompleteness of the Western notion of freedom in Western political thought, based solely on the experience of white, Eurocentric property-owners. From escape to open defiance to self-immolation, agency and struggle constitute the core elements of freedom for subalternized and racialized populations. In this logic, I follow philosopher Nelson Maldonado-Torres in the differentiation of the categories of crisis, disaster, and catastrophe. Briefly stated, crisis denotes a situation needing a correction (333). For Maldonado-Torres, “crisis maintains the sense that something of value can still be rescued” (334), or that something new may result. An example would be the US presidential crises in times of impeachment. If a crisis requires a decision, a disaster is when no decision is taken. That is a disaster (334). We can understand the rise of Nazism as a disaster. Catastrophes may start as disasters, but “they bring that undefined extra. . . that crisis and disaster do not carry” (335). They “are incalculable, uncontrollable, and ultimately ungovernable” (335). Catastrophes become tipping-points leading to seminal ruptures, or foundational divides (338). Deeper than disasters, their consequences prove devastating. Catastrophes demand new, transformative frameworks once they take place. The landing of Hernando Cortés in Mesoamerica was the foundational catastrophe that destroyed the Mesoamerican life world, not unlike the Jewish Holocaust, if ten times larger (60 million victims instead of 6). One of the wealthiest regions in the planet was suddenly put upside down in a few years, becoming the opposite of what it had been for millennia. Ontological elements validating Mesoamericans’ understanding of the world had existed for thousands of years. For example, a Maya astronomer established the synodic period of Venus, 583.92 days, in Chi’ch’èen Itsa’ around 875 CE. His error was just 0.1%. In the West, this remained unknown until Galileo’s findings. It was only in 1716 that Edmond Halley published data analogous to the 841-year-old calculation. These astronomical achievements resulted from the domestication of maize. Mayas studied the cosmos to achieve its optimum conditions. Irrigation canals, hundreds of miles long, supplied water to the fields. They fertilized them with sediment and aquatic plants collected from the canals, creating a self-sustaining ecosystem. Their agricultural system fed millions in hundreds of large metropolises. Maize was the epicenter of their culture, organizing a holistic web of relationships that brought together humans, animals, plants, natural forces, spirits, and landforms. In the Popol Wuj, the Maya creation story, the Hero Twins Jun Ajpu and Xb’alamke (a female; they symbolize the masculine and feminine essence of living beings), descended to the Underworld, defeated their Lords, then ascended to the cosmos to become the sun and the moon. As such, they generated the water and fire for maize.3 Afterwards, Grandmother of Day and Grandmother of Light, ground the kernels which the Feathered Serpent used to forge the first four men and women, the people of maize. To live, they planted, cooked, and consumed maize. This implied preserving the ecological conditions that made it possible. A Mesoamerican subject only truly existed when building his planting parcel, a milpa, which included beans and squash. These crops were planted

186 Arturo Arias together. Maize is the structure for beans to climb; beans provide nitrogen to the soil; squash spreads along the ground, blocking the sunlight to keep weeds away. Their fallen leaves become mulch. A microclimate is created, retaining moisture and keeping destructive pests away. Eaten together, they provide all nine essential amino acids. Mesoamerican cultures prospered and developed on a plant-based diet. They eschewed domestication of animals in favor of game management, grew crops under the rainforest canopy to preserve it, and created a relatively disease-free environment thanks to hygienic practices, including daily bathing and ritual sweat baths. Their ontological thinking centered on the milpa. Cosmic symbolism and ecosystems were the same thing. The cosmic dimension kept its unity and integrity based on those factors that determined the milpa well-being: wind, rain, the right number of nights and days before maize flowered, the adequate growth of vegetation for rivers to flow properly, even the right amount of volcanic eruption, so lava replenished the soil. These factors are determined by celestial bodies. The sun and the moon loom larger, but even subtle planetary movements such as the Earth moving closer or farther from the sun, or the solar system crossing magnetic fields pushing and pulling as it circulated were important. Rituals built bridges with deities associated to celestial bodies impacting the growth of maize. A semiotic signification integrating human and natural elements with the cosmos was constituted, symbolized by rituals, festivities and mythicized practices. As time passed, the cosmological machinery articulated significations transcending the maize cycle. It became a semantics of symbolic representation. Maize needed the sacrifice of the Hero Twins to exist. They died like old maize stems, were transformed in the underworld to seeds, then reborn as baby maize. They became celestial bodies to provide the right amount of water and warmth for new stems to grow and ears of maize to develop in a healthy fashion. In turn, newer beneficiaries would have to sacrifice themselves to preserve the cycle of maize. When Cortés landed in 1519, a Triple Alliance integrated by Mexicas, Texcocans, and Tlacopans ruled the Central Valley of Mexico. They gained hegemony in 1432, then expanded throughout southern Mexico, all the way to present-day Western Guatemala. These polities conquered many city-states. However, rulers were generally left in power and local government continued without much interruption. Defeated city-states paid tribute and sent armies to fight with the Triple Alliance. Their policy of indirect rule meant that, when defeated, if rulers acknowledged the superiority of the Mexica and paid their tribute, they were left alone. The Alliance expanded fast. The demographic explosion of the Late Mexica period generated widespread intensification of agriculture, while also improving education and health. Stone terraces were built in hilly locations, rivers were dammed for canal irrigation, and the shallow swampy lakes of the Valley became fertile fields through the construction of chinampas. Technological knowledge contributed to advancements in agriculture and architecture. Medical practice was so effective that early Spanish invaders abandoned their own doctors for Mexica medical specialists.

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Cortés’s defeat of the Triple alliance was accidental. As Spaniards stumbled into the region, they introduced infectious diseases, including syphilis, smallpox, and measles. This became a disaster when Tlaxcaltecs – with whom Mexicas had been distanced for about 50 years – rescued a defeated Cortés fleeing Tenochtitlan, the Mexica capital and present-day Mexico City, nursing him back to health. The smallpox epidemic killed thousands and weakened able-bodied people. Mass famine and deaths from malnutrition resulted, before Cortés’s troops even laid siege to the city. The disaster became a catastrophe when Tlaxcaltecs helped Cortés build boats and attacked jointly by water instead of by land. One-quarter of a million Mexicans were killed overall, including warriors and civilians. Then came the worst. Salmonella enterica entered Mesoamerica with Spanish pigs. Locally known as cocoliztli, it produced a deadly outbreak where close to 15 million people died. As Spaniards moved south, their battles were against sick soldiers. An estimated 80%–90% of the population of 1519 were dead by the 1540s, according to David. E. Stannard and other scholars reworking new data during the last 25 years. Abiayala’s Indigenous history and the ensuing coloniality cannot be explained without this. Spaniards sought to erase Mesoamerican history. Grotesque descriptions of their pre-European achievements were deployed to discredit them as savages, cannibals, or heathen (Restall: 2018).4 This eased the Spanish crown’s efforts to implement a model of extractive colonialism to mine for silver and gold. In 1550 and 1551, Friar Bartolomé de las Casas debated the Spanish historian Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in Valladolid, on the putative humanity or inhumanity of Indigenous peoples. David Theo Goldberg argues in The Racial State (2002) that this was the true beginning of the concept of race. Guatemalan Criollo historian Antonio de Fuentes y Guzmán’s already took for granted the racial inferiority of Indigenous peoples, portraying them as “those miserable, blind and savagely hopeless, primitive Indians of this Kingdom of Goathemala” (1690:16). In Kuxlejal Politics (2017), Mariana Mora analyzes three tropes defining colonialization. They are the infantilization of racialized peoples, the role of the peon or servant as the naturalized space of subalternized peoples, and the representation of racialized bodies as inherently deficient. For Mora, “these three tropes operate as overlapping racialized disciplinary mechanisms that continue to circulate through the apparently color-blind neoliberal policies” (2017, 17) implemented through globalization. Those tropes first appeared in the 16th century, then spiraled through time and place, going through different phases. What remains is race as the basic principle for classifying and ranking colonized subjects. Redefining them justified enslavement and theft of their resources. The annexation of land, appropriation of raw materials, and subjugation of colonized populations induced the economic boost enabling European industrialization. Indigenous populations recovered numerically by the end of the 18th century, yet 19th-century Independence from Spain did not change their status. The Spaniards’ colonial claim of their racial inferiority became ingrained in the social imaginary of Criollo elites and among European Enlightenment thinkers. Kant and Hegel virtually transformed this abjection into dogma. In that logic, Western

188 Arturo Arias modernity only recognized national imaginaries created by lettered, upper-class heterosexual men. The colonial matrix defining Indigenous subjects as lessthan-human beings continued unimpeded, associating them with “barbarism” in texts such as José Milla’s novel La hija del adelantado (The daughter of the Adelantado, 1866), Central America’s foundational fiction, which depicts them as demonic, to facilitate a new form of settler colonialism implemented by national elites to “whiten” national populations.5 Despite losing numerous rebellions during the three centuries of Spanish colonization, and efforts to gain independence in 1820, Mayas’ relationship to their biotic environment prevented migrating. In Yucatan, the colonial imaginary was forcefully imposed since Fray Diego de Landa held an auto-da-fé in 1562 in which Maya codices and cult images were burned. Jacinto Can Ek’ rebelled in the 18th century against these racialized mechanisms. He adapted the name of Can Ek’, Star Serpent, to establish a cosmological link to past Itsa’ rulers.6 Most batabs or community leaders supported Can Ek’ and joined the struggle to reestablish the Mayab’. For calendric reasons, Cisteil was chosen to launch the rebellion. Before the Spanish invasion, the Feast of the Feathered Serpent, K’uk’ulkan, was held there (Bracamonte, 98). The rebellion began with the dance of the xtoles, an ontological trope making reference to the Hero Twins Jun Ajpu and Xb’alamke’s descent to the Underworld, explained previously. Can Ek’ was crowned on November 19. At first, Mayas defeated Spanish militias. Ultimately, a strong Spanish force defeated him on November 26, 1761. He was condemned to be “tortured, his body broken, and thereafter burned and the ashes scattered to the wind” (Bracamonte, 166). In the nineteenth century, Yucatecan authorities enslaved Mayas in henequen plantations. In the 1840s, conservative authorities attacked Maya villages when they sided with Mestizos seeking independence. Invoking Can Ek’s name, Mayas responded in 1847 with a ferocious war led by Cecilio Chi’, batab (community leader) of Tepich, known in Yucatan as the “Caste War,” and by Mayas as baatabil kichkelem Yúum, “the splendid war of batabs and God.” It lasted until 1928 and killed approximately 275,000 people. This was the first major decolonial war after Spanish independence. Mayas succeeded in creating independent republics in what is now the state of Quintana Roo, site of Cancún and the Maya Riviera, in eastern Yucatan. Báalam Naaj and Noj Kaaj Santa Cruz was their capital,7 now named Felipe Carrillo Puerto. The two first Yukateko Maya novels, Cecilio Chi’ (2003) by Javier Gómez Navarrete, and El llamado de los tunk’ules (2011; The call of the tunk’ul drums) by Sol Ceh Moo, are both historical fictions about this war, celebrating Maya armed efforts to overcome enslavement and racism. In Chiapas, an auto-da-fé also took place in 1554, in the main plaza of Ciudad Real, now San Cristóbal de las Casas. In 1584, a small revolt took place to defend clandestine Maya religious practices, a critical aspect of their cultural resistance and ontological preservation of rituals associated to maize. Tseltal communities rose in 1712 to oppose racism and were joined by neighboring Tsotsil towns.8 It took the Chiapanecan government a year to extinguish this movement. The Tsotsil hamlet of Tsajaljemel rose up in arms from 1867 to 1870, when a Chiapanecan militia massacred Tsotsil towns. Tsotsil poet Luis López Díaz published an

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epic tragedy in 2006, Oxlajuneb k’ejimol sventa Tsajaljemel/Trece cantos por Tsajaljemel (Thirteen Cantos for Tsajaljemel). For him, the insurrection resulted from forced recruitment to enslave Mayas to harvest coffee, provoking forced temporal migrations away from their villages to coastal plantations. In the 1990s they opted to join the Zapatistas rather than be displaced by international corporations exploiting wood in their region. In all three sites, Guatemala, Chiapas, and the Yucatan peninsula, Mayas opted for rebellion rather than migration due to their obligation to fulfill the cycle of maize in specific locales. For Maya communities, to break their holistic web of relations situated for millennia in a specific life world would be a catastrophe. This explains their stoic, silent acceptance of forced migrations to unhealthy environments. In Guatemala, Maya communal lands were taken by the liberal regime in the 1870s. They were privatized, then sold to wealthy Mestizos to produce coffee, booming in the last quarter of the 19th century. Guatemalan Mayas resisted. They were massacred, in what became their second genocide (the first, the Spanish invasion). For nearly one hundred years after this, they were forced to migrate to the Pacific coast to harvest coffee, cotton, and sugar cane. For nearly 500 years, Mayas underwent innumerable crises and disasters after the catastrophe of the Spanish arrival. Throughout all of them, they refused to abandon the lands where their grandparents, great grandparents, and all ancestors had their umbilical cord buried. In Maya cosmological thinking, umbilical cords are connected to the Milky Way, named by them K’uk’ulkan, the feathered serpent. To properly fulfill the cycle of maize, they must die in the same place where they are born. I mentioned two genocides suffered by Guatemala’s Mayas, the catastrophe following the Spanish invasion and the loss of their communal lands in the 1870s. The third was the Guatemalan 36-year-old civil war following the United States’ overthrow of democratic president Jacobo Arbenz in 1954. In 1952, Arbenz, a progressive president, approved a land reform program. It was opposed by the US-owned United Fruit Company, the largest landowner in the country. The Eisenhower government ordered a CIA coup to overthrow Arbenz in June 1954. The land reform was cancelled. Most land recipients, whether poor Mestizos or Mayas, were arrested, tortured, and executed. Even patriotic young army officers resented the coup. They launched guerrilla warfare in November 1960. This escalated into a full-fledged civil war lasting until a peace treaty was signed in December 1996. Mestizo revolutionaries enlisted Mayas. They understood that this could undermine the colonial pillars sustaining the racialized system. Many joined. The Guatemalan army responded with a massive genocide that wiped out over 626 Maya villages between 1981 and 1984. They also killed or “disappeared” more than 200,000 Mayas and displaced an additional 1.5 million from their homeland. More than 150,000 saught refuge in Mexico. Freedom is not static. Mayas had lived since the early 16th-century dehumanizing situations that imposed on them the servility outlined by Mora. In deploying myriad forms of agency to respond to the colonizers over centuries,

190 Arturo Arias they always remained in their life world. From the Spaniards’ arrival until the 1960s, they defended their homeland and stayed put. The tide finally turned in the early 1980s. As the army exercised what Mbembe named “the politics of cruelty, and the symbolics of profanity” (Necropolitics, 22) transforming repression into a reign of terror that became a racial war, Mayas finally left. Confronting the catastrophe of a third genocide, they exercised agency as flight. Some went to designated refugee camps on the Mexican side. A few hid in areas cut off from access in the mountains, surviving in secret societies. Others went to the United States. Roberts’s recognition that the will to freedom is always partial, fleeting, and temporary explains what happened. Agency never disappears. Every subject whose world has been shaped by slavery, coloniality, or the heritage of both, knows this. For the first time since the 1520s, significant numbers of Mayas fled their homeland. Survival became close to impossible. The U.N.-sponsored Truth Commission concluded in its 1999 report, Memory of Silence, that military and paramilitary groups were responsible for 93 percent of war deaths. Eighty-three percent of the victims were Mayas. One-quarter were women. More than 100,000 Maya women were raped. The end of the war and the signing of the peace treaty in 1996 was expected to end this process. Many refugees returned. Illusions dissipated rapidly. Neoliberal free trade policies were implemented in 1997, allegedly to overcome stagnant wartime economic growth. These impacted Mayas primarily. Anthropologist Emily Yates-Doerr documented their harrowing conditions at the end of 1990s. Maize from the United States flowed into Guatemala thanks to the free trade agreements opening the country to imports. Countless rural farmers went into debt or financial ruin. Yates-Doerr talked to many. They were convinced that the flow of American maize was punishment for their participation in the war. Many felt that President Clinton undermined his promise to no longer support repression by simultaneously pushing for trade liberalization. Mayas were forced to flee again, this time to escape crushing poverty. A second immigrant wave began. At the turn to the 21st century, non-regulated parallel powers took over. The war empowered military officers and civilian allies supporting them during the armed conflict. They partnered with organized crime to accumulate capital and challenge the traditional ruling oligarchy. This implied tampering with the law to instrumentalize regulatory agencies such as ports or the tax agency to enable cartels to transport drugs through Guatemalan territory and launder profits in construction and other businesses. By extending illegal permits, offering nonexistent concessions, granting tax exonerations, or diverting fraudulently earned funds to international tax heavens, their drive for power impacted the population. In 2004, mining corporations in collusion with this coalition began strip mining in Maya territory. The Marlin Project extracted gold and silver between the towns of San Miguel Ixtahuacán and Sipacapa in Western Guatemala. Residents were predominantly Maya Mam, the fourth largest Maya group. Glamis Gold, based in Reno, Nevada, owned the mine. They claimed they would ensure the well-being of the population. Mayas knew better, yet there was little they could

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do. The government approved the project. Local communities were not consulted. This began the destruction of postwar survival. The Marlin mine begat malnutrition, infant mortality, deep-rooted violence, and the loss of loved ones in the communities impacted by the mine. Massive protests led to repression, criminalization of the organizers, and sexual violence against Maya women. Private security hired by Guatemalan contractors were linked to drug cartels. They extorted the local population daily to take over their homes, water, and land. Protection had to be paid when using public transportation. The lack of means to preserve law and order and the growing insecurity multiplied turbulent forms of social chaos. The brutality reached critical levels unseen in a country that had lived just about everything, combining disciplinary, biopolitical, and necropolitical aspects from Mbembe’s terminology (27). Strip mining generated significant damage in geographical areas. Animals and plants died in great numbers. Acute deforestation, contamination of rivers, and air pollution made the region unlivable. Toxic waste resulting from cyanide caused skin diseases. Water became contaminated from acid drainage. The circumstances bankrupted over 2 million wheat, maize, and potato Maya producers, whose only alternative was to flee. Women and families fled in record numbers to the United States, the fourth major wave in less than 30 years. By this time, flight had become the new normal mechanism for exercising agency in Maya communities. The waves of migration begun in the 1980s meant that many had relatives in the United States, making it easier to seek help crossing the border, finding places to stay, or a job, if they succeeded. Given these events, I deploy marronage to the experiences faced by contemporary Guatemalan Mayas. Their will to preserve their ontological knowledge in the biotic space of their life world was the key factor keeping them from flight during nearly half a millennium, despite enduring Dantesque circumstances marked by unbridled brutality. The collective recognition of the conditions of impossibility to continue doing so indicates the seminal shift taking place. A set of catastrophic consequences made flight the sole possibility to exercise free will. It became their only way to preserve their ontological knowledge, even if this meant abandoning their biotic space, their most precious treasure throughout the long night of colonialism. This last immigrant wave evidenced an unwillingness to return to the indescribable terror they had lived. It also made evident psychological, social, metaphysical, and political issues impacting racialized and subalternized subjects struggling to exit conditions of genocide. Amidst this ocean of unimaginable suffering, we should celebrate these subjects’ capacity to struggle for their freedom and assert their rights to a lived social space even if surviving in liminal conditions. It provides evidence of the potential to exercise agency. These factors account for those thousands of migrants which, crossing the vast Mexican territory controlled by drug cartels and resembling war-like conditions as well, reached the US-Mexico border, if only to witness how their children were taken from them and placed in hieleras. Migrant waves were big business for American companies that hired so-called illegal workers at less than minimum wages and without benefits in the United

192 Arturo Arias States, thus lowering their overhead costs significantly, and for Guatemalan governments that could ignore conditions of extreme poverty, given that billions of dollars were sent in remittances (7.5 billion in 2017 alone) to Guatemala by Maya immigrants. Remittances became the sole way to guarantee survival in Maya villages. Were they to disappear if their kin were repatriated, we would witness an apocalyptic chaos of such proportions that it would dwarf the descriptions in this article and could well reach the epic proportions of the 1520s and 1530s. Carlos Yescas has shown that no official data exists on Indigenous migration to the United States. No track has been kept of immigrants who identify as such. More recently, the United Nations Human Settlements Program (UN-HABITAT) and the Secretariat of the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples have begun to collect data on this issue. Yescas adds: The first documented international migration of indigenous peoples is that of some P’urhepecha males from the Mexican state of Michoacan who participated in the U.S. Bracero program in the 1960s; this program brought hundreds of thousands of Mexicans to the United States to work temporarily in agriculture. As political scientists Jonathan Fox, Gaspar Rivera-Salgado, and others have found, Hñañus, Mixtecs, and Zapotecs migrated before the end of the Bracero program and have continued to migrate without documents to the United States. (N/P) In this same perspective, Tristan Ahtone, a member of the Kiowa Tribe, reported in High Country News that, “according to a 2015 report by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), K’iche’, Mam, Achi, Ixil, Awakatek, Jakaltek and Qanjobal, Maya languages spoken in Guatemala and southern Mexico, have been “represented within the ICE family residential facilities.” To conclude, the recognition of these genealogical threads helps us understand the structuring logic of the present-day refugee crisis in the southern border of the United States. As Gutiérrez Rodríguez claims for Syrian refugees in Europe, the dichotomy between citizens and migrants is embedded in the same racializing logic of social imaginaries configured at the beginning of colonization. The enduring effects of their epistemic power evidences their junction with racial capitalism. This power of hierarchization based on racial constructs sustains the logic of present-day migration policies. Achille Mbembe argued in “Necropolitics” (2003) that the colony as trope represented a site where sovereignty consisted fundamentally of exercise of power outside of the law; where “peace” resembled a “war without end” (23). In the crisis of the southern border of the United States, we find the same thing. In line with Mbembe, we claim that contemporary Mayas no longer struggle for autonomy. They fight to prevent their extinction. As the prohibition of the right to kill is eliminated, daily experiences become life-threatening. The politics of cruelty, and the symbolics of profanity are the new normal, just as in colonial plantation

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systems (22). These were ruled as terror formations sunk in absolute lawlessness due to the racial denial that common bonds existed between the “civilized” nations of the Global North and local natives. In the recent past, a colony was delimited within a specific geographical area. A colonial subject could escape to the Western Hemisphere and regain a modicum of subjecthood. Yet, even this fleeting possibility has disappeared. The colony is everywhere. The impulse to flight is curtailed by engineered crises shaping conditions for acceptability of the physical elimination of large sectors of humanity. The planet is becoming a death-world (40), a totalizing space where Global North ruling elites define who is disposable and who is not (27). Under those conditions of necropower, systemic violence leads to the irreparable destruction of critical segments of humanity. The border crisis is an economy of terror sustained by an illusory rationality for control, which in deploying hallucinatory means to display power, obscures our understanding of the way this desire can transform terror from a means to an end in itself.

Notes 1 The phrase from the Guna language means “land in its full maturity.” Bolivian Aymara leader Takir Mamani (real name, Constantino Lima Chávez) – spelling it Abya Yala – recommended it in the early 1980s. The correct spelling is Abiayala according to the Gayamar Sabga, the Guna language dictionary. Gunas only standardized their writing in 2006. This scriptural change was made public in 2017. 2 Roberts explains this in p. 5 of his introduction. The term is from Césaire’s 1955 poem “The Verb Marronner, a Reply to René Depestre, Hatian Poet.” 3 Other Mesoamerican cultures speak their own language and used different names for their deities. Overall, however, their cosmogonic understanding of a maize-centered origin for civilization and culture is surprisingly like the Maya K’iche’ example cited from the Popol Wuj. Mesoamerica was an interactive region where a high number of city-states shared analogous cultures and engaged in multiple forms of material and cultural exchanges as of at least 2000 BCE. 4 See also Neta Crawford’s Argument and Change in World Politics. 5 See the many discussions on the 19th-century notion of civilization versus barbarism. 6 Bracamonte y Sosa, La encarnación de la profecía Canek en Cisteil, 107. 7 Báalam Naaj and Noj Kaaj literally mean “satisfied jaguar and great motherland” In Yukateko Maya. In other words, “the great motherland of the satisfied jaguar.” 8 In the highlands of Chiapas, many Tseltal and Tsotsil towns are near each other, and share many cultural traits.

Works cited Ahtone, Tristan. “Indigenous Immigrants Face Unique Challenges at the Border.” High Country News. June 21, 2018, www. https://www.hcn.org/articles/tribal-affairs-indige nousimmigrants-face-unique-challenges-at-the-border. Accessed 7 January 2020. Bracamonte y Sosa, Pedro. La encarnación de la profecía Canek en Cisteil. México, DF: CIESAS, 2004. Casaús, Marta. Guatemala: Linaje y Racismo. San José, Costa Rica: FLACSO, 1992. Ceh Moo, Sol. T’ambilák men tubk’ukulilo’ob/El llamado de los tunk’ules. México, DF: CONACULTA, 2011.

194 Arturo Arias Crawford, Neta C. Argument and Change in World Politics: Ethics, Decolonization, and Humanitarian Intervention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Cumes, Aura and Santiago Bastos. Mayanización y vida cotidiana: La ideología multicultural en la sociedad guatemalteca. Vol. 1. Guatemala: FLACSO/CIRMA/ Cholsamaj, 2007. Dakin, Karen. “Linguistic Evidence for Historical Contacts between Nahuas and Northern Lowland Mayan Speakers.” Astronomers, Scribes, and Priests: Intellectual Interchange between the Northern Maya Lowlands and Highland Mexico in the Late Postclassic Period, edited by Gabrielle Vail and Christine Hernández. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2010, 217–240. Du Bois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Esquit, Edgar. Otros poderes, nuevos desafíos: Relaciones interétnicas en Tecpán y su entorno departamental (1871–1935). Guatemala: Magna Terra, 2002. Fanon, Franz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1963. Fuentes y Guzmán, Francisco Antonio. Recordación Florida: Discurso Historial y Demostración Natural, Material, Militar, y política del reyno de Goathemala: libros primero, segundo y tercero de la primera parte de la obra. Guatemala: Editorial José de Pineda Ibarra, 1967. Goldberg, David Theo. The Racial State. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. Gómez Navarrete, Javier. Cecilio Chi’: Nen óol k'ajlay/Cecilio Chi’: novela histórica. México: SEP, 2006. Gutiérrez Rodríguez, Encarnación. “The Coloniality of Migration and the ‘Refugee Crisis’: On the Asylum-Migration Nexus, the Transatlantic White European Settler Colonialism Migration and Racial Capitalism.” Refuge 34, no. 1 (2018): 16–28. Harry, Harootunian. The Unspoken as Heritage: The Armenian Genocide and its Unaccounted Lives. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. López Díaz, Andrés, Angelina Díaz Ruiz and Luis López Díaz. Sbel sjol yo’nton ik’/ Memoria del viento. San Cristóbal de las Casas: CONECULTA, 2006. Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. “Afterword: Critique and Decoloniality in the Face of Crisis, Disaster, and Catastrophe.” Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm, edited by Yarimar Bonilla and Marisol LeBrón. Chicago: Haymarket, 2019. Mbembe, Achille. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Memory of Silence. The Guatemalan Truth Commission Report. Edited by Daniel Rothemberg. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Milla, José. La hija del adelantado: Novela histórica. Guatemala: Imprenta de la Paz, 1866. Mora, Mariana. 2017. Kuxlejal Politics: Indigenous Autonomy, Race, and Decolonizing Research in Zapatista Communities. Austin: University of Texas Press. Quijano, Aníbal and Immanuel Wallerstein. “Americanity as a Concept; or, The Americas in the Imaginary of the Modern World-System.” International Journal of Social Science 134 (1992): 549–559. Restall, Matthew. When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting that Changed History. New York: Harper Collins, 2018. Roberts, Neil. Freedom as Marronage. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015. Stannard, David E. American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

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Van Deusen, Nancy. Global Indios: The Indigenous Struggle for Justice in SixteenthCentury Spain. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. Yates-Doerr, Emily. “Why Are So Many Guatemalans Migrating to the U.S.?” Sapiens. October 25, 2018. https://www.sapiens.org/culture/guatemala-migrants-united-states/. Accessed 7 January 2020. Yescas, Carlos. “Hidden in Plain Sight: Indigenous Migrants, Their Movements, and Their Challenges.” Migration Information Source. March 31, 2010. https://www.migratio npolicy.org/article/hidden-plain-sight-indigenous-migrants-theirmovements-and-their -challenges. Accessed 7 January 2020.

Part V

Translocalities in Latin America

15 Bordering the crisis Race, migration, and political strategies in anti-populist Ecuador1 Jorge Daniel Vásquez

The recent Venezuelan migration (2016–2019) to different Latin American countries has not only brought to surface the limitations of the region to find conciliatory solutions to Venezuela’s conflict at the national and global levels but has also made evident the collapse of multiculturalism in response to the issue of difference and racism. On the other hand, the juncture opened by the corrupted process of impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in 2016 and the subsequent election of the militarist Jair Bolsonaro as president of Brazil in 2019 (Casara 103–125), as well as the 2019 coup d'etat orchestrated by Bolivian right-wing political actors against Evo Morales, implied racial hatred and xenophobia manifested as a shameless practice placing immigrants as well as indigenous and black populations under intolerable conditions. In this chapter, I address not only the problem of coexisting among different people or with “the difference” in contemporary societies but the production of difference itself. I place this production within the framework of political strategies and violence against popular subjects. My analysis focuses on political conflict scenarios that, at least discursively, are framed in crisis contexts. Referring to cultural studies and historical sociology in Latin America, I focus on how the socalled “migration crisis” and the economic crisis, as expressed in Ecuador (2018– 2019), have been led by the government through the activation of mechanisms of differentiation and political violence to promote a neoliberal project accentuating inequality. In Ecuador, the case of Venezuelan migration in 2018 and 2019 is crucial because it established a cultural configuration2 that broke with the State, media, and daily discourses that had taken place in the country during the last ten years. In this sense, I propose that the discourse on the “Venezuelan migration crisis” contributed to the Ecuadorian government’s (in office since 2017) efficacy in the creation of an imaginary of “economic crisis” that justifies neoliberal reform. With explicit references to “the crisis in Venezuela” and “the economic crisis in Ecuador,” the government of President Lenin Moreno created conditions for a confluence between anti-migrant hostility and the rejection of “progressive populism” within the consolidation of a “neoliberal pact.” I analyze how the neoliberal pact connects immigration and populism as causal elements of the crisis within the framework of a political strategy that I call

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“inequality by difference.” This strategy reactivated colonial patterns of allocation of racial difference and “foreign status.” However, I also indicate that “inequality by difference” is confronted by political actors who articulate around equality from social and popular coalitions. Such a political strategy is inscribed in an accumulation of historical struggles for “equality by the popular.” Therefore, “inequality by difference” and “equality for the popular” work together as an analytical matrix that allows us to read political strategies in a historical and cultural sense. Using this matrix, I analyze the political crisis and the conflict framed in the national strike of October 2019 in Ecuador, convened by the indigenous movement and other social groups.

Bordering the crisis or how neoliberalism produces difference Between 2017 and 2019, the so-called “migration crisis” in Venezuela hit the South American region. The number of Venezuelan migrants living outside their country increased from 2.4 million in September 2018 to approximately 4.2 million in July 2019. Thus, by July 2019, 3.4 million Venezuelan migrants resided across Latin American countries (UNICEF 2018; UNICEF 2019a).3 The commonly cited causes concerning the rapid growth of Venezuelan migration were insecurity, violence, hyperinflation, and the economic blockade exerted by the United States in 2017 and 2019 (Weisbrot and Sachs).4 The increase in the frequency of expressions of racial hatred and xenophobia toward Venezuelan immigrants coincides with the so-called “right-wing turn” in Latin America.5 In Ecuador, Moreno won the 2017 presidential elections as the official candidate of the political party “Alianza País” and the so-called “Citizen Revolution” (founded and led by Rafael Correa), beating banker Guillermo Lasso who received the support of the traditional parties of the Ecuadorian right. However, the Moreno government took a radical turn concerning the predecessor government of Correa (2006–2017). In a series of moves to dismantle the policies of what he had insistently labeled as a populist government, Moreno reconstituted a pact among the elites of financial capital, the business clusters, and private media companies. This neoliberal pact directs the drastic reduction of public spending and the dismantling of social care programs that were central during the Correa government. This precarious agenda was demonstrated reliably with the enactment of the new “Productive Development Law” (in August 2018), which promoted and accompanied the first phase of reforms within the requirements of the International Monetary Fund for the signing of a debt agreement. In October 2019, the government of Ecuador faced 11 days of a national strike as a measure of widespread rejection against the enactment of Presidential Decree No. 883 that eliminated fuel subsidies and announced a series of neoliberal labor reforms submitted to the National Assembly. Demands to repeal Decree 883 allowed the unification of different political forces in a social-popular bloc in opposition to the neoliberal pact. During the first week of the national strike (October 1–9, 2019), the actors of the conflict were located around two opposing blocs. Thus, the neo-liberal

Bordering the crisis 201 pact was made up of the two main right-wing political parties: Christian Social Party – PSC, and the “Creating Opportunities” movement (CREO); the Business Chambers of Quito and Guayaquil, the Chamber of Industries of Ecuador, the large private media, and the Presidency of the Republic in the person of Lenin Moreno. On the other hand, the social and popular bloc led by the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), incorporated the Unitary Front of Workers (FUT), student organizations grouped in the National Front of Students, and the Feminist Front of Ecuador. Assembly members identified with the “Citizen Revolution,” social movements in other provinces, and some middleclass sectors converged on the side of the social and popular bloc. Ecuadorian government repressed the national strike with an unprecedented magnitude of violence in the country’s history. Except for the former government of León Febres-Cordero (1984–1988), the balance of the repression reached by the Moreno government exceeds any other episode in Ecuador’s post-dictatorship political history.6 Regarding the 11 days of national strike in 2019, the report of the Human Rights Office of Ecuadorian State (Defensoría del Pueblo) registered 10 people deceased, 1340 injured, and 1192 police detentions (66% of the detentions were arbitrary) in the midst of confrontation between the police and protesters.7 The repressive force was conducted not only towards visible leaders of the social and popular bloc but also towards citizens who joined to meetings, rallies, and marches supporting the strike. The government described the protest actions as vandalism produced by a “group of drones”8 and denounced a destabilization plan orchestrated by Rafael Correa, Nicolás Maduro, Venezuelan and Cubans migrants, ex-members of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), and the Latin Kings.9 As of February 2020, the Ecuadorian government has yet to present any evidence of the existence of such a destabilization plot. It is not the first time that, in facing an indigenous uprising, the Ecuadorian government has not recognized the legitimacy of the protest, and instead has accused the indigenous movement of being manipulated by outside actors. What is unprecedented in the case of the Moreno government is that it charged the indigenous people with promoting an uprising orchestrated by foreigners, especially from Venezuela. How was it possible that, within the framework of the national strike, the Ecuadorian government managed to accuse Venezuelans of being the inciters of violence during the protests? I argue that the accusation of Venezuelans as responsible for the crisis is not an impromptu exit, a distracting element, or a sort of scapegoat of the Ecuadorian government. Instead, this government action seizes the opportunity provided within the neoliberal project to simultaneously produce racial and political boundaries, the boundaries whose production accompanies and legitimizes violence against immigrants and indigenous peoples. The division between desirable and undesirable foreigners accompanies the history of the twentieth century in Ecuador. Alana Ackerman analyzed how through official documents issued between 1938 and 1971, the state discourse on foreigners contributed to defining the borders of the Ecuadorian State from a

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control and security approach, sustained in the classification of those undesirable migrants.10 In 2008, the constitution of Ecuador proclaimed the “universal citizenship” and the progressive elimination of foreigner status. Although the management of migration policy had regressions and was contradictory in the treatment of migrants from Europe, Africa, and Latin America who arrived in Ecuador significantly between 2010 and 2015, it was the “migration crisis” of Venezuelans that reactivated, with greater clarity, an anti-migrant political discourse including xenophobic elements. The analysis of xenophobia cannot be considered outside the cleavages of race, class, and gender at the local and global levels, making for the sociocultural analysis the difference between desirable and undesirable appears as a polarization that reduces heterogeneity. Prior to the October 2019 national strike, the Ecuadorian government had already spent two years jointly positioning the migration crisis as a scenario of economic crisis at the national level. Heterodox economists described the latter as an “induced crisis” since 2018 projected as an economic recovery due to the increase in oil prices, the expansion of oil and non-oil exports, and the flow of remittances from Ecuadorian migrants.11 Corporations with media control, officials, and politicians articulated to the neoliberal pact justify the measures as a way to prevent the “Venezuelanization” of Ecuador. The term “Venezuelanization,” in their discourse, referred primarily to the shortage of food, household goods, and medicines.12 What is disconcerting in the Ecuadorian case is that the neo-liberal pact justifies the antipopular economic reform as a preventive measure in the face of an eventual Venezuelanization of Ecuador. In other words, the neoliberal pact induces an economic crisis to avoid “being like Venezuela” (i.e., avoiding a ‘crisis’). What is indecipherable or absurd in terms of economic logic is not in political terms: the neoliberal pact generated the discursive conditions for the return of external indebtedness and privatization of public services. However, thinking about the confluence of the economic crisis and the migratory crisis allows us to reveal the complementary resources of an antipopular project. The anti-Venezuelan discourse promoted by the neoliberal pact within their economic agenda provided a resource to process another crisis: the migration crisis. Thus, the fictitious “Venezuelanization” that the elites had accused acquired a real place in the faces of Venezuelan migrants in the country.13 At this juncture, the hostile messages toward migrants, common in several Latin American countries, broke through sharply: “Venezuelans take work away from Ecuadorians,” “Venezuelans are criminals and increase insecurity,” “the government of Maduro is sending criminals” (Ripol and Navas, 15–23; Constante and León). At the conjuncture that preceded the national strike, the responses to control the free transit of Venezuelan migrants, securitization programs targeting migrants, and economic adjustment measures were how the neoliberal pact drove the migration crisis. In the discourse of these actors, the migration crisis has as ‘a cause’ the populism, authoritarianism, dictatorship, and fascism (for them all this is the same or does not require distinction) of the Venezuelan government.

Bordering the crisis 203 In this same vein, the economic crisis has its ‘origin’ in the populism, corruption, socialism, extravagance (again, all together or the same) of the government of Rafael Correa. By blaming the previous government or other countries, the neoliberal pact sought to generate in its favor a state of opinion that closes the gate to reflectively process the crisis or to democratically constitute ways to deal with it.14 The national strike showed that such government strategy could be contested by social and popular sectors. In this sense, the conflict about the “migration crisis,” economic crisis, and political crisis can be registered in a two-moment analytical matrix that helps the historical and cultural understanding. The first has to do with the possibilities of placing anti-immigrant hostility within the analysis of inequality by difference based on colonial patterns of representation and the coloniality of power (Quijano), while the second has to do with tensions around equality for the popular, which, in the Latin American case, finds expression in plebeian republicanism, and populism as a political process.15

Inequality by difference vis-á-vis equality by the popular: Political strategies during the national strike While historical sociology, both in the case of Latin America (Assadourian, Quijano) and in the case of Ecuador in particular (Velasco; Guerrero) have realized how the exploitation of labor, alongside forms of servitude (i.e., paid but also forced work) – dating back to colonial context – acquired vigor at the postcolonial moment of capitalist development; coloniality in Ecuador is featured by the formulation of policies and the selective use of ethnocentric, essentialist, eugenichygienist, and exoticizing discourses that allow not only continuity but recreation, of forms of exploitation and inequality from the sub-alternation of subjects due to their race and ethnicity, geo-territorial identity (peasants, migrants), gender, or class. Such sub-alternation is imposed, although not exclusively, from patterns of representation of a colonial origin (Muratorio; León; Flores; O’Connor). In Ecuador, coloniality operates through what Mezzadra and Neilson (159) call a “differentiated inclusion” that gives way to inclusion through illegalization (165). I see “differentiated inclusion” not only as a way to produce difference but to reproduce inequality in the same phase. Far from an essentialist culturalism, establishing the analysis of coloniality allows us to understand the logic by which inequality is made from a difference, that is, inequality by difference. Since the foundation of the Ecuadorian republic, oligarchic pacts disputed the control of legal institutions, media, and the arts for their economic-political project (Carrasco et al.). However, such a dispute occurred precisely against the political blocs that promoted equality, not oligarchic but popular.16 Thus, if the analysis of coloniality allows us to understand inequality by difference, the study of the formation of anti-oligarchic political blocs during the twentieth century enables us to understand equality through the popular, that is, equality by the popular (Striffler; Coronel, La fragua de la voz; Coronel, Izquierdas, sindicatos y militares).

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Failure to do this counterpoint would conceal how in Latin America, the different identity ascriptions, crossed by cleavages of race, class, and gender, have become politicized in the midst of the democratic struggle for the expansion of rights, with a conception of non-exclusive citizenship. These political struggles involved the ideological debate about real citizenship against anti-democratic citizenship promoted by elites in the 20th-century Latin America (Torres Santana). In the 21st century, the debate on plebeian republicanism both in Latin America (Aboy Carlés; Rinessi; Coronel and Cadahia) and the United States (Kazin; Frank; Grattan) connects with such on populism. This connection goes against the widespread conception of populism as the exaltation of the charismatic leader, the direct (and irresponsible) distribution of public funds, the manipulation of the masses, and an anti-institutional vocation. Therefore, the analysis of equality by the popular connects with populism from a focus on the historical experiences where ethnic and class differences became politicized within social conflict confronting attempts to restrict citizenship to the private sense given by the rulers of the new national states. As Valeria Coronel states, populism is susceptible to analysis as “collective action that reactivated the language of popular sovereignty and gave new encouragement to the formation of the National State in Latin America in the framework of global crises” (Vásquez and Villegas 234). Therefore, in confrontation with the anti-populist neoliberal pact, the language of popular sovereignty floated within the framework of the 2019 national strike. Although the protests claimed the repeal of Decree 883, the strike allowed the unification of diverse political forces in a bloc with social and popular demands against the neoliberal pact. However, such a unification manifested in contention with the political strategy of differentiation. Patterns of inequality by difference took place the moment in which the neoliberal pact resorted to ‘Venezuelanization’ to block the configuration of the political conflict from the antagonism between the privileged and popular bloc. The neoliberal pact promoted an antagonism between the disfranchised Ecuadorian population and the immigrant population. The Moreno government assigned identifications framing an opposition between Ecuadorians (as a homogeneous and nonviolent subject) and Venezuelans who would have reached to ‘destabilize the country.’ Marked by the confluence of the migration crisis and the economic crisis, the neoliberal government pursued simultaneously to exclude immigrants and differentially include disfranchised. The government holds such discourse during the first five days of the strike. On Tuesday, October 8, 2019, it was the sixth day of the national strike. Protesters blocked Quito, the capital city, and police and military forces had deployed security operations in many areas. On that day, Lenin Moreno left Quito and moved the Government headquarters to Guayaquil, where he received the support of the right-wing leaders Jaime Nebot (PSC) and Guillermo Lasso (CREO). City Mayor Cynthia Viteri (PSC) and Nebot together oriented their speech on “defending the city of Guayaquil” from the “invaders” (i.e., members of the indigenous mobilization who announced their displacement to Guayaquil to demand the repeal of Decree 883). Once the media framing of “protecting Guayaquil” was

Bordering the crisis 205 socially installed, the PSC leader declared that Guayaquil has enough military force and local police threatening the indigenous protesters and asking them to “remain in the páramo.”17 The statements of the conservative politicians must be read from two forms of racialization that converged during the national strike. The first does not only have to do with the reduction of indigenous identity to a territorial character and the spatial delimitation of their political rights, but with the very fact of threatening the lives of indigenous people. The other racialization form has to do with the criminalization of foreigners. Both forms, in the context of the national strike, respond to the production of difference amid the political conflict. At first, government spokesmen described indigenous organizations as manipulated by ‘the correístas,’18 then they reoriented to a more reconciling speech (i.e., “‘our indigenous fellows’ are peaceful people but there are ‘correístas’ infiltrated,” “indigenous people need agricultural bonus but not violence”). Finally, they regretted that among the protesters, there were ‘Chavistas’ (referring to Venezuelan immigrants) and ‘members of the FARC’.19 During the national strike, Ecuadorian people saw, perhaps for the first time, their government proposing deportation as one of the possible solutions to a political crisis. Both racialization forms were not only expressions of differential racism20 (Balibar 31–45) but also of an assignment of identities that “entails the construction of the ‘threatening other,’ a category that operates as a legitimate stratification criterion” (Kessler 53). Preventing protests from being conceived in terms of the fight for equality, the government combined violent repression with a discourse of racialization and xenophobia. Thus, Ecuadorian officials established distances either of an ideological type (to separate the ‘pacific Indigenous people’ from the ‘violent Chavistas’ or ‘vandals’ supposedly infiltrated) or of a moral type (demanding ‘our indigenous fellow’ to “condemn the Correístas”). While journalists and right-wing politicians asked indigenous leaders “to apply indigenous justice” to Correístas infiltrators21, the denunciation of Venezuelan infiltrators and Colombian ex-guerrillas worked discursively in favor of increasing police repression on the streets. In other words, the neoliberal pact tried to manage the political crisis by distorting the antagonism between the two blocs, trying to move it into opposition within the different actors that made up the protest bloc in an ideological operation based on xenophobia and racial prejudices. Part of this was the case of the 19 Venezuelans detained at the Quito airport. On October 9, Minister María Paula Romo made an exclusive TV streaming where she pointed the Venezuelans as ‘conspirators.’ The next day, the Venezuelans citizens (who were taxi drivers but not conspirators) were released by the State Attorney General for lack of evidence.22 The imaginary about a confluence of economic and migration crisis set several months before the protests had moved to the scene of the political turmoil. The xenophobic statements accumulated since 2018, accompanied by restrictions on the mobility and regularization of migrants, presided over the denunciation of a “Venezuelan” and “populist leaders” conspiracy against Lenin Moreno.

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The social and popular bloc insisted on the popular and anti-neoliberal character of the protest, and not exclusively as demands of the indigenous movement. For the power in office, indigenous people must respond only to the identity assigned from coloniality, or as Claudia Zapata points out: the relationship between these long-standing representations and the question of power, is that the dominant society mobilizes them according to the current correlation of forces because it ends up being comfortable to accept or even celebrate (as with multiculturalism) the existence of these cultural differences while they are harmless, but the situation changes substantially when indigenous society is mobilized politically in order to transform that correlation of forces. (Zapata 57–58) Here we see a crucial element for the understanding of equality for the popular: the dynamic construction in which the established identification categories are transgressed and the political struggle is condensed. The government’s speech sought to exalt the “características primigenias” (indigenous primigenial features) (Zapata 57) to create a distance between indigenous people and other political actors that were part of the same social and popular bloc. On October 13, the United Nations mediated an agreement between the government and the indigenous movements. The government repealed Presidential Decree 883, and the indigenous movement declared that the national strike was over. The Moreno government moved to the systematic persecution of political leaders,23 continuing to reproduce the discourse on the antagonism among ‘those from below,’ and insisting on the foreign threat. The possibility of consolidating the popular bloc by promoting the dynamic nature of citizenship, which manifests in the open struggle for its materialization, its translation into economic, social, and political equality, disputing the disposition of legal institutions, power structures, and the cultural field, remains as a crucial task for popular forces.

Concluding remarks Borders could be more strongly anchored in the production of differences, and, in the context of political conflicts, differences occur to enable inequality policies as part of a neoliberal agenda. But the history of inequality by difference is also the story of its opposite. It is also the history of the refusal to remain within the subaltern condition that despotic power assigns – the history of those who put a brake on the fractionation or reduction of their condition as equals. Thus, the democratic community is built on the dispute to expand citizenship before the will to dispossess through difference. Global South Regions are made up of peoples who share the experience of confronting the political violence of colonialism, internal colonialism, financial and military violence, and forms of subjectification from coloniality. Neither

Bordering the crisis 207 the market nor the State was entirely constituted in 19th-century Latin America. However, the construction of the State endured the bond between the colonial condition and the commodity. Thus, the political issue implies the replacement of the colonial bond with an articulating link between identities that goes beyond the administration of heterogeneous niches of neocolonial or neoliberal exploitation. Indeed, it is also a history of class coalitions, but no social class is in itself anti-racist. Coalitions require inquiry around the configuration of racism at the local level and the elements of racialization in the establishment of class differences. Such question entails the need to understand the historical specificities in the race–capitalism articulation not only from the relationship between imperial states and colonial states, or from the core-States to the periphery, but the place of racialized groups in the conformation of the workforce subordinated to local, national, and global capital/neoliberalism. In this vein, the analysis of the political strategies during the Ecuadorian national strike gives a case to think about borders and crises from the racialized configuration of historical specificities to the social conflict that reactivates it, and the struggle it unleashes.

Notes 1 For their comments on this paper I thank Liliam Fiallo, Thomas Corcoran, Franklin Ramírez, Aaron Yates, and Germán Chiriboga. 2 Grimson (13) proposes the concept of ‘cultural configuration’ as “the specific (i.e., historical) way of making the constitutive heterogeneity of a social space intelligible.” 3 According to the International Organization of Migration (IOM), the main destinations of Venezuelans immigrants are Colombia, Chile, Peru, and Ecuador. In April 2019, the Colombian government referred to 1.2 million Venezuelans in Colombia who intended to reside permanently. Peru estimated 800,000 Venezuelan migrants and refugees. In Chile, the Department of Foreigners ensures the number of 400,000 Venezuelans. In Ecuador, during May 2019, the Ministry of Interior registered the entry of 87,828 Venezuelans (84,433 across the northern border) (UNICEF 2019b; 2019c, 2019d). 4 These factors, isolated from their political genesis, as well as from the geopolitical framework, are named by both the Ecuadorian and international press as consequences of what they call “the Maduro regime” (referring to Nicolás Maduro, president of Venezuela since April 2013). 5 This “right turn” refers to the triumph of right-wing political parties in countries that were part of the so-called Pink Tide from 2002 to 2015 approximately. Such a “turn” supposedly started with the electoral victory of neoliberal leader Mauricio Macri in 2015 in Argentina. Although the idea of a “right-turn” in the region can be challenged (from the 2018 Mexican elections and the 2019 Argentinian elections), it is true that currently the so-called “progressive governments” do not constitute a hegemonic force. 6 Dictatorship in Ecuador was from 1972 to 1979. For the León Febres Cordero government (1984–1988), the Truth Comission registered 287 victims of crimes against humanity being the government with the highest record in Ecuador (Comisión de la Verdad 2010, 53). 7 “La Defensoría del Pueblo presenta séptimo informe con resultados de la vulneración de derechos durante el estado de excepción”. Defensoría del Pueblo, 2019, “Sube a 10 fallecidos durante las protestas en Ecuador”, Pichincha comunicaciones, October 23, 2019 8 The phrasing “un grupo de zánganos,” coined by President Moreno, refers to the Spanish connotation of the word “zángano” (i.e., drone, buzz) as idler people.

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9 The “Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation” (LK) is a street gang originally from the United States and introduced in Ecuador specially by deported immigrants. In 2009, during the Correa government, LK signed a peace agreement and became an association declaring the cessation of violent activities. 10 The Official Decree of 1938 prohibited the entry of “crazy people, idiots, beggars, people with incurable or contagious diseases, prostitutes, people previously expelled from Ecuador or any other country, people who would compete with Ecuadorians for employment [...] gypsies, people who would make political propaganda” (Ackerman 52). Aliens Act of 1947, written according to the beginning of the Cold War, ratified the categorization of the ‘undesirable.’ It only modified its language in the 1970s. However, the difference between desirable and undesirable remained. 11 In 2019, Ecuador experienced a severe decrease in consumption levels and increased unemployment, which effectively leaft a country marked by the economic crisis that opened with the recession from 2015. However, by 2018, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) forecasted a growth of 1.5%. Nevertheless, the debt payments to private corporations, as well as tax reforms that benefit economic and financial elites in the Moreno government, say of the political decision not to solve the fiscal crisis in another way than external indebtedness and the privatization of public services. Moreno's political decisions caused unemployment figures to increase in 2018 (Páez). 12 “Venezuelanization” (“Venezolanización” in Spanish) is a pejorative term, used to indicate a supposed path that left-wing political projects would follow in case of winning the presidential elections in the second decade of the 21st century in Latin America. Thus, leftist leaders such as Gustavo Petro (Colombia), Fernando Haddad (Brazil), or Alberto Fernández (Argentina) were accused of pretending to turn their countries into a “Venezuelan version” of their own countries. This meaning of the term “Venezuelanization” is also used alongside countries with Venezuelan migrants to emphasize the “migration crisis.” For example, “Chilezuela” or “Peruzuela” (in Chile and Peru respectively), was used to indicate a harm caused by Venezuelan immigrants. In this second sense, “Venezuelanization” is a term used to mediately pressure rightwing governments to “reinforce the border” (i.e. to implement anti-migrant policies). 13 Herrera and Cabezas Gálvez (126) estimate that the immigration stock of Venezuelan people at the end of 2018 was 250,000. The calculation is made based on the migration balance raised by the Ministerio del Interior and the National Institute of Statistics and Census. 14 To the extent that various actors in the political–ideological spectrum, through social movements, academic circles, and guilds, contribute to the legitimization of what the neoliberal pact points as ‘the cause’ and ‘the origin’ of the crisis, it blocks the analysis of factors such as the dismantling of participation mechanisms, the promotion of ‘entrepreneurship’ in the face of mass layoffs of public, or the media complot. 15 I focus on the latter. Most of the research work on this subject focus on the period between the late 19th century and the middle of the 20th century. In this sense, my work represents an effort to connect this political tradition with current processes in a framework of a multiculturalism crisis (Zapata). 16 Peter Wade (470) points out that in Latin America (from the end of the 19th century until the middle of the 20th century): “[…] citizens who felt excluded worked for an inclusion that evidenced, in various ways, problems of difference, while, on the other hand, elites actively produced the difference in their discourse and practice.” 17 “Nebot se disculpa por lo de páramos…” Expectativa, October 22, 2019. Paramo is the name of the treeless meadow in the rural mountain region in Ecuador. “Remain in the paramo!” is a derogatory expression and it was used as a racial slur by Nebot. 18 “Correístas” refers to the people that support the ‘Citizen Revolution’ or would vote Rafael Correa. ‘Chavista’ refers to those people that identify themselves with the “Bolivarian Revolution” initiated by Hugo Chavez’s in 1999.

Bordering the crisis 209 19 “Lenín Moreno: protestas en Ecuador están infiltradas por FARC y chavistas”, Panamapost, October 11, 2019. 20 “It is racism whose dominant theme is not biological heredity but the insurmountability of cultural differences, racism which, at first sight, does not postulate the superiority of certain groups or peoples about others but ‘only’ the harmfulness of abolishing frontiers, the incompatibility of life-styles and traditions” (Balibar 21). 21 Ecuadorian press has played a key role in a type of multiculturalism that Fiallo (132) that reduces indigenous justice to a ritual of punishment. 22 “Extranjeros detenidos en aeropuerto de Quito tenían agenda presidencial, según ministra de Gobierno”, El Universo, October 10, 2019, and “En libertad y sin cargos: venezolanos detenidos con supuesta información sobre Lenín Moreno en Quito eran conductores de taxi”, RT, October 11, 2019. 23 Especially indigenous leaders like Leonidas Iza and Jaime Vargas from the National Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities (CONAIE), as well as Paola Pabón and Virgilio Hernández, political characters of the Citizen Revolution.

Works cited Aboy Carlés, Gerardo. “Las dos caras de Jano: acera de la compleja relación entre populismo e instituciones políticas.” Pensamiento Plural 7 (2010): 21–40. Ackerman, Alana. La ley, el orden y el caos. La construcción social del Estado y el Inmigrante en Ecuador. Quito: IAEN, 2014. Assadourian, Carlos S. “Modos de producción, capitalismo y subdesarrollo en América Latina.” In Modos de Producción en América Latina. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 1974. 47–81. Balibar, Etienne. “Is there a Neo-racism?” In Wallerstein, Inmanuel and Etienne Balibar, eds. Race, Nation and Class. London: Verso, 1991. 17–28. Carrasco, Adrián, María A. Vintimilla and Cecilia Suárez. Estado, Nación, Cultura. Los proyectos históricos en el Ecuador. Cuenca: IDIS, 1988. Casara, Rubens. Estado Posdemocrático. Neoliberalismo y gestión de los indeseables. La Habana: Ciencias Sociales, 2018. Comisión de la Verdad. Informe de la Comisión de la Verdad. Ecuador 2010. Sin Verdad No Hay Justicia. Quito: Ediecuatorial, 2010. Constante, Soraya and Edu León. Éxodo de un país roto hacia uno que olvidó su pasado. El rol de los medios para enfrentar la xenofobia. April 2019. Quito: FES-ILDIS, 2019. Coronel, Valeria “La fragua de la voz: cartas sobre revolución, subjetividad y cultura nacional-popular.” In Aleman, Gabriela and Valeria Coronel, eds. Vienen ganas de cambiar el tiempo. Epistolario entre Nela Martínez y Joaquín Gallegos Lara, 1930– 1938. Quito: FONSAL, 2012. 381–490. Coronel, Valeria “Izquierdas, sindicatos y militares en el bloque de izquierdas del Ecuador de interguerras (1925–1945).” In Camarero, Hernán and Marcelo Mangiantini, eds. El movimiento obrero y las izquierdas en América Latina. Experiencias de lucha, inserción y organización. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2018. 195–215. Coronel, Valeria and Luciana Cadahia. “Populismo republicano: Más allá de «Estado versus pueblo”. Nueva Sociedad 273 (2018): 72–82. Fiallo, Liliam. “El tránsito hacia el multiculturalismo en Ecuador desde la perspectiva de los derechos de los pueblos y nacionalidades indígenas. Un estudio constitucional.” Cálamo 1 (2014): 123–136. Flores, José. Pedagogía y Colonialidad en la Amazonía ecuatoriana (1960–1979). Quito: PUCE, 2016.

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Frank, Jason. “Populism isn't the problem.” Boston Review, 2018, www.bostoreview.net Grattan, Laura. Populism's Power. Radical Grassroots Democracy in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Grimson, Alejandro. Los límites de la cultura. Crítica de las teorías de la identidad. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2012. Guerrero, Andrés. Los oligarcas del cacao. Ensayo sobre la acumulación originaria. Quito: Conejo, 1994. Herrera, Gioconda and Gabriela Cabezas Gálvez. “Ecuador: de la recepción a la disuación. Políticas frente a la población venezolana y experiencia migratoria 2015–2018.” In Gandini, Luciana, Fernando Lozano and Victoria Prieto, eds. Crisis y migración de la población venezolana. Entre la desprotección y la seguridad jurídica en Latinoamérica. México, DF: UNAM, 2019. 125–156. Kazin, Michael. The Populist Persuasion: An American History. New York: Basic Books, 1995. Kessler, Gabriel. El sentimiento de inseguridad. Sociología del temor al delito. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2009. León, Christian. Reinventando al otro. El documental indigenista en el Ecuador. Quito: CNC, 2010. Mezzadra, Sandro and Brett Neilson. Border as Method, or the Multiplication of Labor. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. Muratorio, Blanca, ed. Imágenes e Imagineros. Representaciones de los Indígenas ecuatorianos, Siglox XIX y XX. Quito: FLACSO-Abya Yala, 1994. O’Connor, Erin. Género, Indígenas y Nación. Las contradicciones de construir el Ecuador, 1830–1925. Quito: Abya-Yala, 2016. Páez, Pedro. “Ecuador y el FMI: volverán las oscuras golondrinas.” Nodal. Noticias de América Latina y el Caribe, 2019, www.nodal.am Quijano, Aníbal. “Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo y América Latina.” In Lander, Eduardo, ed. La colonialidad del saber. Eurocentrismo y Ciencias Sociales. Perspectivas Latinoamericanas. La Habana: Ciencias Sociales, 2005. 216–271. Rinessi, Eduardo. “Populismo, democracia, y ‘nueva izquierda’ en América Latina.” In en Véliz, Claudio and Ariana Reano, eds. Gramáticas Plebeyas. Buenos Aires: Ediciones UNGS, 2015. 23–51. Ripol, Santiago and Lizbeth Navas-Alemán. Xenofobia y discriminación hacia refugiados y migrantes venezolanos en Ecuador y lecciones aprendidas para la promoción de la inclusión social. Noviembre 2018. Striffler, Steve. In the Shadows of State and Capital. The United Fruit Company, Popular Struggle, and Agrarian Restructuring in Ecuador, 1900–1995. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Torres Santana, Ailynn. “Signos y realizaciones republicanas en América Latina: líneas gruesas para el diálogo con los populismos.” In Cadahia, Luciana, Valeria Coronel, and Franklin Ramírez, eds. A contracorriente. Materiales para una teoría renovada del populismo. La Paz: Vicepresidencia del Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia, 2018. 41–60. UNICEF. “Migration Flows in Latin America and the Caribbean.” Situation Report, September 2018. UNICEF. “Migration Flows in Latin America and the Caribbean.” Situation Report No. 6, July 2019a. UNICEF. “Migration flows in Latin American and the Caribbean.” Situation Report No. 3, April 2019b.

Bordering the crisis 211 UNICEF. “Migration Flows in Latin America and the Caribbean.” Situation Report No. 4, May 2019c. UNICEF. Venezuela Situation Report. 2019d. Vásquez, Jorge Daniel and Bernardo Villegas. “Populismos y ciclos de conflictividad política en el Ecuador. Una entrevista con Valeria Coronel.” Theorein. Revista de Ciencias Sociales 4, no. 1(2019): 233–253. Velasco, Fernando. Ecuador: Subdesarrollo y Dependencia. Quito: Conejo, 1981. Wade, Peter. “Liberalismo, raza y ciudadanía en Latinoamérica.” In Mosquera, Claudia, Agustín Laó-Montes and César Rodríguez, eds. Debate sobre ciudadanía y políticas raciales en las Américas Negras. Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2010. 467–486. Weisbrot, Marc and Jeffrey Sachs. Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment: The case of Venezuela. Washington: Center for Economic and Policy Research, 2019. Zapata, Claudia. Crisis del multiculturalismo. Conflictividad social y respuestas críticas desde el pensamiento político indígena. Guadalajara: CALAS, 2019.

16 From the “suffering stranger” to the IDP The emergence of a new problem area Juan Ricardo Aparicio

During the mid-1990s in Bogotá, Colombia, I, like many of the inhabitants of the city, noticed numerous people, standing on street corners and asking for money from passersby. Some were Afro-Colombians, others indigenous people coming from rural areas of the country. As in many major cities of Third World countries, the image of individuals alone or sometimes accompanied by their entire families standing in the streets asking for money is a common scene. But these people were not only asking for money; they were standing with poster signs and pasted photocopies of documents kept in paper folders, pleading for help. I soon learned that these were official certifications, photocopies of their documentation, letters written to the institutions demanding their rights in terms of education and housing in Bogotá, including the Carta de Salud (Health Card). These items were identifying them not just as poor people asking for help but also as “internally displaced persons”, or IDPs. In this chapter I want to critically examine how this new category, the IDP, came into existence and what are the effects that this category has had for the processes of protecting, alleviating, and governing this particular population. I am very interested in both the production of a new positivity, consisting of both enunciation ns and visibilization of what the Brazilian anthropologist Joao Biehl names as zones for social abandonment. This is a biopolitical history, but for sure, it must be considered a “minimum biopolitics”, as Peter Redfield rightly argues when thinking about the minimum vital kits produced by Doctors without Borders (MSF, in the French acronym) during their different operations. Even if IDPs do not cross international borders, they do traverse other type of borders that one needs to acknowledge, through Mezzadra y Neilson’s proposal of a border methodology and epistemology. In particular, these other borders are racial, economic, and social, but also, these are borders for capital accumulation. More importantly, they are borders that determine the type of responses that different caring communities and institutions, both from the secular and non-secular worlds, undertake to protect, historically and globally, these suffering individuals. These actions constitute philosophical and pragmatic responses to the question of what is to be a human being in the contemporary world, in the sense of what are the techniques, procedures, knowledge, and practices meeded to alleviate the suffering of the IDPs.

From the “suffering stranger” to the IDP 213 Following Rabinow, I want to anthropologize the configuration of knowledge that made the category possible in the 1990s as a new problem area worldwide, “by showing how exotic its constitution of reality has been: emphasize those domains most taken for granted as universal; make them seem as historically peculiar as possible”; and, finally, to “show how their claims to truth are linked to social practices and have hence become effective forces in the social world” (Rabinow, 241). Indeed, some of the reasons why people fled to the cities during the 1990s had been present in the longer history of Colombia and in the world over. Other reasons emerged more recently in response to the violent contestation over certain territories by different actors who reacted to the extraction of legal and illegal resources, connected to global economies. But never before were people forced to move; they rather remained within their own country, being referred to as “internally displaced persons” (IDPs). What I do want to suggest, inspired by Foucault’s analysis of discursive formations, is that this specific object of study, the IDP, only came into existence within a specific worldwide configuration in the mid-1990s. That is the history I will briefly trace here. Today, one of the most common and appalling ways in which the IDPs category has entered into the humanitarian world is through quantitative considerations and official statistics. The current statistical report from the United Nations High Commission of Refugees claims that there are 70.8 million displaced persons worldwide distributed in this way: 25.9 million refugees, 3.5 asylum seekers, and a remainder of 41.3 internally displaced persons.1 Just to recall that by 1998 Kofi Annan was talking of 20–25 million IDPs worldwide. In almost 20 years, the number of IDPs has doubled due to its increasing visibility, but also as a result of a myriad of factors such as natural disasters, climate change, internal armed conflicts, and drug wars. Since 2015, as the 2018 UNHCR report signals, Colombia has accumulated the larger proportion of IDPs worldwide with 7,816,500 since 1985. This was the year when the first reports of IDPs in Colombia started to emerge initially thanks to the Catholic Church (Aparicio, “Intervenciones etnográficas”). Indeed, these official numerical estimates emerge when IDPs are registered in national or international tolls. However, one of the most crucial philosophical, political, humanitarian, and social problems of registered cases emerges in the determination of when a person becomes an IDP. Also, even if they never cross international borders, it is still difficult to determine when they can be no longer considered an IDP, thus being expelled from this category. A person becomes an IDP through certificates, interrogations, and proofs needed to be included into the national registers of IDPs, a process being handled by a humanitarian bureaucracy. One needs to remember, for instance, the whole debate during Katrina emergency in 2005 regarding the use of the term refugee or IDP, and what this meant for the US general public for the naturalization of poverty or the rejection of international attention towards a national problem (Masquelier). Feldman has also studied the difficult distinctions put in place by one of the most controversial and unacknowledged displaced persons, the Palestinian refugees, a fleeting population inside and outside international borders. Thus, next to the question of when does one enter into the category, is the question of when

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does the condition of internally displaced persons ceases to exist, and what they become. How are they healed? What does it mean to leave this category and enter a new one? Do they become a citizen, a nomad, a rogue? Although I am not discussing here these central dilemmas, I recognize that they are closely related to the many ways in which groups and persons that enter and exit the category of IDP survive in the outskirts of the city, under precarious conditions, managing to make a living on their own, without further assistance. Ironically, approximately two years after the peace negotiations between the FARC and the Colombian government concluded, the UNCHR reports – only for registered cases for 2018 – 118,100 new internal displacements2 (El Espectador 2019). These new displacements are related to the confrontations and disputes for territories and resources, between different armed actors. Illegal mining and coca production, impacted by the power vacuum left by the FARC guerrilla, converted regions such as Catatumbo, Nariño, Antioquia, and Chocó into disputed areas. Threats and assassinations of peasant leaders involved in processes of land restitution have also fueled recent processes of displacements. At the same time, there has been a death toll of 702 social leaders and 135 ex-guerilla members since January 2016 and May 2019 (El Espectador 2019). Thus, with all these figures coming from Colombia and other parts of the world, one meditates not only about the ultimate effectivity of categorizations for making sense of this humanitarian tragedy, but also, on the delusion, deprivation, and abandonment of these sectors. In the first section of this chapter, I am inspired by the Foucauldian approach interested in the role of discursive regimes in the constitution and positioning of subjects and subjectivities. Here, I want to recognize the constitution of a new “visible” object of study (the IDP) that emerges simultaneously as an “articulation” of relations of knowledge, forms of government, subject positions, and particular practices of subjectification. In this brief section, I am particularly interested in tracing the conditions of possibility for the emergence of new “visibilities” and “articulations” (Deleuze). In the second part of this chapter, I want to assess some of the effects that this recognition has had in the Colombian society, for internally displaced persons. Obviously, there are no simple answers to these problems, and mainly due to ongoing epistemological and methodological debates. I want to analyze particular responses when the category of IDP is disputed, appropriated, and utilized by different sectors of society, in unpredictable ways. But also, I would like to analyze what happens when the same category is resisted by movements of victims in the context of an organized rejection of the present humanitarian government in Colombia, while other forms of subjectification are being recreated and explored.

A brief history of a new “suffering and caring community” While I was in Geneva carrying out my ethnographic research on the humanitarian agencies in charge of protecting the IDPs, and after discussing with a Médicine Sans Frontières officer in the same city, in 2007, the organization’s humanitarian impact on climate change, I was compelled to interrupt the conversation and ask

From the “suffering stranger” to the IDP 215 directly: Since when and how does MSF deal with IDPs? The officer stared at me for a couple of seconds before he laughed and answered: “MSF has never dealt with IDPs”. I remained silent, thinking to myself: Is he joking? Is his answer part of the sarcastic humor typical of this French-born organization? After sensing my perplexity, this official explained what he really meant by saying that “MSF has never dealt with IDPs”. His explanation became a key element that brought light to the almost obvious difference between human rights and humanitarian genealogies, which I hadn’t considered before. What he told me was that for MSF, the IDP is an irrelevant category for their humanitarian operations. As he explained, the long debate over the usefulness of this category is “a non-debate” for the organization’s interventions and operations in the field. According to him, MSF operations are not based on this category, but on the fact of the basic needs of the suffering population. If the members of these populations are IDPs or not, was of no consequence to them. Their type of engagement, following Redfield’s analysis on the history of the concept and practice of ‘neutrality’ within MSF, was not predicated on the basis of sovereignty. This organization is concerned about those who suffered, those who needed clean water, or mental therapy, during or after a crisis. As simple as that. I obtained the same answer later that afternoon while interviewing an officer of the ICRC. In a similar vein, I asked about the ICRC’s role in relation to IDPs. For the officer, the Geneva conventions and the 1977 Protocols had already defined the agency’s focus on protecting civilian population in the middle of any international or internal armed conflict. Even more, with a sarcastic tone similar to the one used by the MSF officer, she told me that right from the agency’s beginnings in the nineteenth century, they had already worked with victims of internal conflicts, including displaced individuals. Actually, in both interviews, I could sense some suspicion over the usefulness of the IDP category and all the recent debates it has triggered both in the academy and the human rights and humanitarian community. The MSF officer made it clear: “the starting point of the [MSF’s] intervention is about the needs, and then the status of the person may have an impact on the way we perform our duties, or prolongation of our work, but that comes after” (Personal Communication, June 2007). What matters are those suffering bodies and the profound concern with maintaining and protecting their lives. The human, before a citizen, an IDP or a refugee, was a living entity whose life had to be protected and alleviated before anything else. Needless to say, although I didn’t mentioned it, the ideas used in these interviews about suffering bodies, basic needs, and most of all, the human as such, must be considered problem areas full of frictions and open to debate, in which historical legacies and genealogies must be uncovered and also problematized (Fassin, Humanitarian Reason; Fassin y Rechtman; Fassin and Pandolfi; Feldman y Ticktin).

The refugee and IDPS as new problem areas Hanna Arendt claimed that the events surrounding the First World War and its severe consequences of instability had sufficiently shattered the façade of

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Europe’s political system to lay bare its hidden frame (267). Loescher estimates that approximately two million Poles migrated to Poland and one million ethnic Germans moved to Germany from their previous homes in the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires (“UNHCR at Fifty” 23). The Greco-Turkish War displaced 1 million more Anatolian Greek and Armenian Refugees. For Loescher, with the changing nature of international warfare, both the dissolution of the old multinational empires in Eastern Europe and the Balkan region and the expansion of the nation-states attempting to create culturally and politically homogenous groups, forced millions of people to abandon their homelands fleeing to new territories. As Arendt shows, these impressive movements of people between states created a power vacuum in which ethnic minorities were excluded from the new territories with no authority to grant them with any rights. The condition of being a citizen and ultimately a human, ceased to exist, creating new residual populations without a state: a stateless population. But very soon, new institutions created largely by the Allies were put in place to govern these populations. What is remarkable about these events is that before these massive movements of people, “Europeans [modern-nation states] did not regard large masses of human beings forced to migrate to seek refuge from persecution as experiencing as a distinctive kind of victimization” Lippert (298). Moreover, for the author, “there was no refugee condition and no such distinction to be made.” In similar ways, as I am trying to argue here, he does not claim that the refugee movement, or even the refugee category, did not exist before3. Rather, in a very Foucauldian way, Lippert argues “that there were no movements, practices or refugees” until the early twentieth century in precisely the same way in which “there was no sexuality until the eighteenth century or human beings with multiple personality disorder until the late nineteenth century” (299). For Loescher, the imprint of the July 1950 UNHCR statute and the July 1951 Convention related to the Status of Refugees was deeply influenced by the experience of the post–World War Europe (The UNHCR and World Politics 44). In fact, as he argues, the tension between the institutions in charge of negotiating the protection of refugees and the sovereign prerogatives and interests of national States have characterized the history of the UNHCR. These documents define a refugee as someone who has a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear or for reasons other than personal convenience, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country (…). (UNCHR Statute, 1951) For Loescher, this persecution-centered definition, molded by Western states, perceived refugees as victims of oppressive, totalitarian, and specifically Communist

From the “suffering stranger” to the IDP 217 regimes (The UNHCR and World Politics 44). In the same direction, Nyers argues that these refugees were perceived as “voting with their own feet.” This is not the place to go into a detailed historical narrative of the Post–Cold War period. It suffices to follow Chandler’s argument that the roots of today’s human rights–based humanitarianism in which the IDP becomes a central feature lay in the growing consensus of support for Western involvement in the internal affairs of the developing world since the 1970s (27). Here, the model of the sovereign-state as the guardian of the human rights of its citizens was replaced by one focused on the human-centered ‘human rights’ model safeguarded by international institutions (Chandler). Chandler identifies two strands of the ‘new humanitarian’ interventionism that predate the post–Cold War consensus. The first “was the extension of involvement from the provision of immediate assistance to victims of conflict to the greater commitments of solidarity and advocacy works for victims and concerns for the long-term protection of human rights for ‘at risk’ groups” (27). The second, “developed with problems of famine and drought, was the move of relief NGO’s from emergency humanitarian aid to long-term development in the 1970s” (Chandler 27). For some of these human rights NGOs, a whole reconfigured notion of sovereignty had to be brought within the UN system that, among other things, would impede the ability of governments like that of Sudan “to invoke state sovereignty [in 1988] when it obstructed or denied outside relief assistance to displaced persons” (Cohen 16). By the late 1980s, a whole series of actors, including many of the previously mentioned, colluded and began to compose and stabilize the IDP category. As recalled by central protagonists of this story in Geneva, New York, and Washington still working in some of these key NGOs such as the World Council of Churches, the United Nations Quaker Office, and the Refugee Policy Group, their offices were receiving reports of a new phenomenon that did not quite fit within the established frameworks of humanitarian and human rights crisis. These reports from the “grassroots level,” as they were called, coming mainly from Sudan, Sri Lanka, and Guatemala, described the forced displacement by armed conflicts of thousands of inhabitants who did not abandon their country of origin. As noted by Weiss and Korn, church groups were “among the first to feel the impact of the growing number of internally displaced persons” (17). By the same year, the Commission on Human Rights, in which many of the protagonists working in the abovementioned NGOs had important links going back to the “international human rights movement” of the late 1980s, “requested the Secretary-General to take into account the protection of human rights and the needs of internally displaced persons in the system-wide review and to submit to the Commission at its forty-eighth session an analytical report on internally displaced” (Deng 1993). Accordingly, by June 28, 1991, the Secretary-General addressed a verbal note to all governments and letters to relevant organizations, requesting information and views on the subject. This report was indeed successful for recruiting followers and for projecting this new problem area within the “human rights” lenses. After this analytical report was submitted, the Commission of Human Rights recognized “that internally displaced persons are in need of

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relief assistance and of protection.” By 1993, the World Conference on Human Rights emphasized the importance of United Nations human rights bodies giving special attention to the IDPs’ problem area (Deng 1995). In Rumores, residuos y estado en la mejor esquina de Sudamérica (2012) I have undertaken an extensive research on this short story that led to the emergency of the IDPs as a full-blown humanitarian category in 1998. This story includes the designation of a United Nations Representative for the Internally Displaced Persons, and the different conceptual maneuvers that its mandate had to put in place in order to legitimize its own course of actions. It also involves the creation of the “Guiding Principles of Internal Displacement,” a “soft law” and for some of my interviewees, a benchmark from which to monitor and measure the treatment of internally displaced persons worldwide. By the time of the Representative’s 1998 report, the IDP problem had almost become a fully stable situation in the humanitarian world. In its first paragraph, the report claims that since the Commission first undertook the analysis of internal displacement in 1992, the international community has made considerable progress with respect to IDPs (Deng, “Report”). In 1998, both the compilation and the major research study of the Brookings Institute were published (Cohen and Deng, Masses in Flight). On these grounds, the report suggests that the challenge now is largely an operational one, consisting of monitoring and translating the normative and institutional progress achieved through research into effective action on the ground (Deng, “Report”). Despite the rapid increase in knowledge on these topics, and although several existing institutions had begun to respond to them by 1998, there were still no signs indicating the future formation of any single agency for IDPs. In fact, the mandate of the Representative still lacked clear institutional ground, and would remain in limbo in subsequent years. As an external consultant to the SecretaryGeneral for the IDPs, the Reprsentative’s office also lacked financial stability. In his 1994 annual report, for example, he described how the resources available to him were minimal in comparison with the monumental challenge of his mandate (Deng 1994). In his 1998 annual report, he explains he had to rely on external assistance, initially in the form of an intern from Harvard, extended by short-term appointments, until her final departure, the previous year. The report mentions that an associate expert, who had been “generously provided” by the Government of Norway, but whose contract had already expired, helped to replace the previous assistant in this position. Another problem highlighted in this document was the limited amount of time that the Representative himself could devote to the responsibilities of his mandate. Since this position was voluntary, according to his agreement with his employer, the Brookings Institution, the work of this mandate should not exceed one-quarter of his work time (Deng 1998 Report.). These are some of the fragments of this story. On the one hand the emergence of the IDPs as a recognizable problem displays all the hallmarks of expanding, bureaucratized discourse, rapidly disseminated and stabilized. On the other hand, it remains institutionally ambiguous, filtered through existing frameworks and part-time endeavors. Throughout these early years, the primary actors devoted

From the “suffering stranger” to the IDP 219 to the issue repeatedly stressed the significance and the global scale of displacements. The report of 1998 indicates, at the end, that although the numbers have fluctuated, a modest estimate places the world’s IDP population at 25 and 30 million persons, spread over 40 countries. As the final paragraph of the report states, “the crisis leaves no doubt that international involvement is necessary since internal displacement is a human tragedy of great magnitude and global dimensions” (Deng, “Outline of Report”).. For the Representative, the implications of not fulfilling this requirement are certainly high: “It is not only a symptom of state failure in varying degrees, whether related to political will or sheer lack of capacity, but is often a crisis with regional and global implications” (Deng, “Internally Displace Persons”). As the last sentence of the report says, now the Commission finally has a normative and institutional foundation upon which to build a more effective and sustainable system of international responses to the crisis of internal displacement (Deng, 1998 Report). These are not just words; literally, they do things. Specifically, and going back to my ethnography, Principle 18 of the Guiding Principles, which mandates that “the property and possessions of internally displaced persons shall in all circumstances be protected, in particular, against the following acts,” was pasted on the door of the old and abandoned cooperative used for refugees by the CPSJA in San José de Apartadó in 2005 before they started a new displacement. As such, these principles are there to guide the course of actions, not only of the humanitarian family and the State agencies. They are also mediated by internally displaced persons in Colombia in fascinating and unpredictable ways. Similar to the ways in which the category of refugee and asylum seeker is tensely mediated and negotiated by both functionaries and victims (Feldman and Ticktin), recent ethnographies have studied how next to the alienation, dehistorization, and dehumanization of these subjects that utterly makes them speechless within the humanitarian government (Malkki), unpredictable processes such as the one of radical repolitization of these subjects and their organizations, or their mere perseverance within the red tape of the humanitarian bureaucracy, are also taking place in Colombia (Cardenas, Bolaños). According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center4 (IDMC 2019), by 2018, there were 5,761,000 living in internal displacement in Colombia. At the same time, 145,000 new displacements occurred in the same year. As of December 2018, the same center identified 1,902,000 registered IDPs, identified as returned, resettled, or relocated in a new community, “but whose progress towards durable solutions is only partial.” The report seemed to be optimistic: “this number is more than twice as many people who had reportedly overcome all seven dimensions of displacement-related vulnerability at the end of 2017.” Behind all these figures one could see the partial effects of the still vulnerable Peace Process with the FARC. However, other organizations and institutions like the Kroc Institute at the University of Notre Dame, which are currently following the implementation of the peace process agreements, have shown the almost absolute paralysis of land restitution and formalization of the integral rural reform, both central dilemmas for the IDPs population and their prospect of overcoming

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their specific vulnerabilities5. On the debate about what would be a partial solution or a complete overcoming of displacement-related vulnerability, one wonders about the conditions of the everyday life and experiences of the subjects, targeted by these humanitarian dipositifs. Recent research on the red tape of the humanitarian bureaucracy in the transitional scenario in Colombia, shows precisely how these rhythms consume and control the time of the persons waiting to be registered, who have to deal with folders, documents, paper work, and the institutional disorganization of different agencies (Buchely). In my own research, I have been particularly interested in following a very innovative response by a community of IDPs that neither left its territory, notwithstanding the real and future threat of threats, massacred and displacements, nor was interested in registering as IDPs within the humanitarian bureaucracy (Aparicio 2012). I am talking of the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, founded in March 23 of 1997, through a complex assemblage that articulated both peasants who had been displaced by new combats as well as by threats made by paramilitary groups, church groups, and national and international NGOs. Once they decided to remain in their territories, they proclaimed themselves to be a noncombatant peasant community, while establishing a code of conduct that would orient what one could consider an ethical project necessary to survive the threats and presence of the armed actors in the region. Their code of conduct included not giving information to any of the armed actors, not carrying arms, participating in working groups, and donating of a day of work to the community. Certainly, the humanitarian dispositifs described before, that begin with the IDPs registration and continue with the dense bureaucratic traps that needed to be traversed in order to receive humanitarian aid, do contrast with the several self-managed actions that the CPSJA has undertaken in order to bring back displaced populations to their territories and to resume their life in devastated spaces (Das). The whole precarious situations of IDPs in the cities, which today forces them to attend innumerable courses given by different institutions on areas such as bakery and food management, in order to turn them into selfentrepreneurs, contrast with the emergent ‘community economy’ practices of working groups, communitarian days of work, and distribution of collective surplus between all members of the IDPs. Several questions are thereby opened: How can we assess the “refusal” of the CPSJA to escape to the cities like other IDPs just to stand in line, waiting for humanitarian aids? How can we evaluate their refusal to trust the justice system in its ability to investigate and judge those responsible for displacements and massacres? How can we analyze their decision to cultivate an autonomous space through creative connections with larger networks, as well as for sustaining the concept of a “non-combatant peasant community” in the middle of the armed conflict? How about their refusal to be part of the “administrative consensus” of a post-agreement or transitional scenario in Colombia? Certainly, there are no easy answers to these questions. But surely, the answers would suggest what a post-human rights and humanitarian regime could look like, and even shed light on the ways in which such a regime has been practiced so far. Even more, those

From the “suffering stranger” to the IDP 221 answers could help us understand what happens when the same victims – and not academic, intellectuals, national of international technocrats, State officials, etc. – are the ones proposing “ethical projects” embedded in relational networks, where no “entity” can be left behind. Whether we consider the dead, the poor, the marginalized, what matters is that those practices recognize the impossibility of separating these individuals from their relational existence. To conclude, I am talking about the emergence of a complex assemblage that could counterpoise the ‘minimal biopolitics’ materialized in the humanitarian dispositifs. I am referring to the construction of a multilayered and complex alternative for moving beyond the frameworks of ‘good governance’ and ‘stateresponsibility’ which are currently conducting, orienting, and delineating most of the human rights and humanitarian operations in Colombia. While the CPSJA is still moving through the circuits of State bureaucracy, it is currently bringing forward alternative genealogies for the care of ‘suffering strangers’ reconfigured both by the Geneva Conventions and by liberation theology, as well as by the tradition of peasant struggle in Colombia. In this complex space full of frictions and tensions, it has been possible to construct an autonomous space that defies the desires of States and para-states to massacre or displace populations.

Notes 1 https://www.acnur.org/es/datos-basicos.html. Last accessed, August 30, 2019. 2 «Colombia, primera en desplazamiento interno por cuarta vez.» El Tiempo, June 20. https://www.eltiempo.com/justicia/conflicto-y-narcotrafico/colombia-es-el-pais -con-mas-desplazados-internos-informe-acnur-378716, last accesed, December 17, 2019. 3 In fact, as noted by Zolberg, Suhrke and Aguayo (1989), the term refugee was first used to refer to the 200,000 Huguenots expelled from France and arriving in England after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1589) by Louis XIV in 1685. The category of refugee did exist well before the 19th century, but never with the simultaneous and dense materialization of a series of programs, technologies, and apparatuses that only emerged in the first decades of the 20th century. 4 “Global Report on Internal Displacement. IDMC. http://www.internal-displacement.or g/global-report/grid2019/, last accessed December 16, 2019. 5 “State of Implementation of the Colombia Peace Agreement.” Kroc Intitute for International Peace Studies. University of Notre Dame. https://kroc.nd.edu/research/ peace-processes-accords/pam-colombia/, last accessed. December 16, 2019.

Bibliography Annan, Kofi. “Introduction.” Masses in Flight: The Global Crisis of Internal Displacement, Robert Cohen and Francis Deng, eds. Washington, DC: Brookings Institute Press, 1998. i–xxi. Aparicio, Juan Ricardo. “Intervenciones etnográficas a propósito del sujeto desplazado: estrategias para (des)movilizar una política de la representación.” Revista Colombiana de Antropología 41 (2005): 35–53. Aparicio, Juan Ricardo. Rumores, residuos y estado en la major esquina de Sudamérica: una cartografía de lo humanitario en Colombia. Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes, 2012.

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Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1951. Biehl, Joao. Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Bolaños, Leidy Paola. “La gestión del desplazamiento interno en Bogotá como una forma de vida”. Revista Colombiana de Antropología 50, no. 1 (2014): 135–169. Buchely, Luisa Fernanda. “Laberintos y Despojos: análisis del proceso de implementación de tierras desde una perspectiva multiescalar de las burocracias estatales.” Etnografías burocráticas. Una nueva mirada a la construcción del Estado en Colombia. Cristina Isabel Jaramillo and Luisa Fernanda Buchely, eds. Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes, 2019. 253–279. Cardenas, Rossbelinda. “‘Thanks to my Forced Displacement’: Blackness and the Politics of Colombia’s War Victims.” Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies 1 (2018): 72–93. Chandler, David. From Kosovo to Kabul. Human Rights and International Intervention. Pluto: Pluto Press, 2002. Chimni, B.S. “The Geopolitics of Refugee Studies: A View from the South.” Journal of Refugee Studies 4 (1998): 350–374. Cohen, Robert. Human Rights Protection for Internally Displaced Persons. Washington, DC: RPG, 1991, Washington, Refugee Policy Group Paper. Unpublished Manusctript. Cohen, Robert and Francis Deng, eds. Masses in Flight: The Global Crisis of Internal Displacement. Washington, DC: Brookings Institute Press, 1998. Das, Veena. “Life and Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary.” Illegibility, The Signature of the State: The Paradox of Illegibility, Veena Das, ed.. Berkeley: Univeristy of California Press, 2007. 162–183. Deleuze, Giles. Foucault. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Deng, Francis. A/48/279 1993 Human Rights Questions: Human Rights Situations and Reports of Special Rapporteurs and Representatives. Internally Displaced Persons. General Assembly. Forty-eight Session. New York: Agenda Item 114(c). United Nations, 1993. Deng, Francis. E/CN.4/1993/35. 21 January 1993. Comprehensive Study Prepared by Francis M. Deng, Representative of the Secretary-General on the Human Rights Issues Related to Internally Displaced Persons, Pursuant to Commission on Human Rights Resolution 1992/73. New York: Economic and Social Council .Commission on Human Rights. Forty-ninth session. Item 11, United Nations, 1993. Deng, Francis. E/CN.4/1995.50/Add.1. 3 October 1994. Report of the Representative of the Secretary-General, Mr. Francis Deng submitted Pursuant to Commission on Human Rights Resolution 1993-95. Addendum. Profiles in Displacement: Colombia. New York: Economic and Social Council. Commission of Human Rights. Fifty-first session, United Nations, 1994. Deng, Francis. A/50/588 20 October 1995, Outline of Report E/CN.4/1995/50 Human Rights Questions: Human Rights Situations and Reports of Special Rapporteurs and Representatives. New York: General Assembly, Fiftieth session, Agenda item 112, United Nations, 1995. Deng, Francis. E/CN.4/1998/53 Add.2. 11 February 1998. Report of the Representative of the Secretary General, Mr. Francis Deng, submitted pursuant to commission resolution 1997/39. New York: Economic and Social Council. Commission of Human Rights, Fifty-fourth session, 1998. Deng, Francis. Internally Displaced Persons: Compilation and Analysis of Existing Norms. New York: United Nations, 1998.

From the “suffering stranger” to the IDP 223 Fassin, Didier and Mariella Pandolfi. Contemporary States of Emergency. The Politics of Military and Humanitarian Intervention. New York: Zone Books, 2010. Fassin, Didier and Mariella Pandolfi. Humanitarian Reason. A Moral History of the Present. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Fassin, Didier and Richard Rechtman. The Empire of Trauma. An Inquiry in the Condicionts of Victimhood. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. Feldman, Ilana and Miriam Ticktin. “Difficult Distinctions: Refugee Law, Humanitarian Practice and Political Identification in Gaza.” Cultural Anthropology 22, no. 1 (2007): 129–169. Feldman, Ilana and Miriam Ticktin. In the Name of Humanity. The Goverment of Threat and Care. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Foucault, Michel. El Orden del Discurso. Barcelona: Fábula Tusquets Editores, 1972. Internal Displacement Monitoring Center. Colombia. Figure Analysis-Displacement Related to Conflict and Violence. Annual Report, Geneva: Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, 2019. Lippert, Randy. “Governing Refugees: The Relevance of Govermentality to Understanding the International Refugee Regime.” Alternatives 24 (1999): 295–328. Loescher, Gil. The UNHCR and World Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Loescher, Gil. “UNHCR at Fifty. Refugee Protection and World Politics.” Problems of Protection. The UNHCR, Refugees and Human Rights. Nicklaus Steiner, Mark Gibney and Gil Loescher, eds. New York and London: Routledge, 2003. 3–18. Malkki, Liisa. “Specchless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and Dehistorization.” Cultural Anthropology 11, no. 3 (1995): 377–404. Masquelier, Adeline. “Why Katrina's Victims Aren't Refugees: Musings on a ‘Dirty’ Word.” American Anthropologist 108, no. 4 (2006): 735–743. Mezzadra, Sandro and Brett Neilson. Border as Method, or, the Multiplicatin of Labor. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. Nyers, Peter. Rethinking Refugees. Beyond States of Emergency. New York: Routledge. 2006. Rabinow, Peter. “Representations are Social Facts: Modernity and Post-Modernity in Anthropology”. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, James Clifford and George Marcus eds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. 234–361. Redfield, Peter. “Doctors, Borders and Life in Crisis.” Cultural Anthropology 20, no. 3 (2005): 328–361. Redfield, Peter. Life in Crisis The Ethical Journey of Doctors Without Borders. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. UNCHR Statute of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. General Assembly Resolution 428 (V ) of 14 December 1950. New York: United Nations, 1951. Weiss, Thomas G and David Korn. Internal Displacement, Conceptualization and its Consequences. New York: Routledge, 2006. Zolberg, Aristide, Astrid Suhrke and Sergio Aguayo. Escape from Violence: Conflict and the Refugee Crisis in the Developing World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.

17 Dispossession by militarization Forced displacements and the neoliberal “Drug War” for energy in Mexico Oswaldo Zavala

México’s unprecedented wave of violence continues to shock the nation in the context of the “war against drugs,” an antidrug militarization strategy that officially began under president Felipe Calderón (2006–2012) and was prolonged in the government of Enrique Peña Nieto (2012–2018). By the end of Peña Nieto’s term, homicides reached a total of more than 250 thousand murders and nearly 40 thousand forced disappearances (Bermúdez). Widely reported by mainstream media during those years, México’s homicide rate had more than double to 26 per 100 thousand inhabitants, 5 times the US murder rate. Elected in 2018 in landslide, leftist president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (also known as AMLO) proposed to end anti-drug militarization and to reconsider the violent prohibitionist policy seeking to pacify the county. But as his government suspended a proposal to decriminalize most illegal drugs, and despite the passing of a recent law of amnesty for non-aggravated drug offenders, the militarization of the country has increased and violence is not diminishing. According to official data, 2019, the first year of the López Obrador government, closed with the highest number of homicides in record, with a total of 34,582 killings (Nájar). It is in this extraordinary context that our work as scholars must carefully comprehend the geopolitical significance of the violence attributed to México’s “drug war.” As official discourse is now clearly in tension between a violent neoliberal state of exception and López Obrador’s proposal to deescalate antidrug military operations and undo prohibitionist laws, I explore the question of “national security” from a multidisciplinary perspective revising preconceived notions on “organized crime” and “narco-culture” as they connect to conventional conceptualizations of migration, displacement, and residual life in the global economy. In what follows, I argue how México’s “war on drugs” has been instrumentalized as a biopolitical mechanism of forced displacements to facilitate, among other objectives, the appropriation of natural resources in communal lands of numerous regions in neoliberal México. Through David Harvey’s concept of “accumulation by dispossession,” I analyze México’s strategy of militarization as a discursive and an operative complement of energy reform policies to legitimize the plundering of oil, natural gas, and mining in the zones with the highest levels of violence misleadingly attributed to drug trafficking organizations. I will focus on the particular case of the recent wave of violence in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas,

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where extractivist interests converge with the militarization, antidrug policies and one of the highest murder rates in the country. I will continue with a reflection on the concept of forced displacements and I will finally argue for a paradigm shift in our current understanding of “drug-related violence” in the context of neoliberal governance and México’s “national security” discourse. Against hegemonic narratives explaining migration as the result of the violence caused by “organized crime” and its “narcoculture,” I will discuss how the circulation of transnational capital depends on binational geopolitics of militarization deliberately creating extreme conditions of insecurity with the complicity of México’s political and business class.

“Drug-related violence” as an object of study: A paradigm in crisis As Mexico’s society has suffered from an armed conflict problematically attributed to a “drug war,” we face a crucial methodological failure from most fields investigating – and interpreting – “drug-related violence”. Social scientists and certainly cultural critics tend to reduce Mexico’s violence to the limits of the hegemonic narrative on national security. This hegemony is built in part through the legitimation of the official explanation of the violence in the work of most national and foreign media covering the drug war, as I have studied elsewhere.1 This manufacturing of consent, is later consolidated in the circulation of an expansive corpus of cultural products consumed by the general public and studied by multiple academic agendas, complacently reassured of the reasons for the “drug war.” Thus, “narcoculture” studies risk replicating the official justifications for the militarization, and as such, they have been unable to think past the “drug war” as the epistemic boundary of their research. Two books from the social sciences can illustrate my point. The collective volume Mexico’s Security Failure, published in 2012 by Paul Kenny and Mónica Serrano, argues for a careful analysis of the rise in violence correctly assessing that México, contrary to certain scholarship, is not a “failed state” and that conversely, the notion of failing states has long been a motif of neoliberal governance pushing for the militarization of the country. Nonetheless, contributors to this book assume that most causes lie in drug-related activities and that the federal government has revealed itself as “utterly unprepared” facing an emergency in which “the territory lost by the state to organized crime extends from the northern border and cities to its very own penitentiary system” (12–13). Most recently, the 2018 volume Beyond the Drug War in Mexico, edited by Will Pansters, Benjamin Smith, and Peter Watt, argues for a critique of the militarization resulting from US pressure for “unrestrained enforcement” of prohibitionist laws that ultimately “‘totalised’ the drug war and violence” across Mexico. But as with the previous investigation, this book leaves the epistemic assumption that “drug-related violence” is at the center of crisis in which “cartels” are capable of influencing the electoral system, national media, and the overall rule of law (2–3). In replicating baseless official justifications for the militarization, neither book is in fact

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able to go beyond the “drug war” as the epistemic boundary of their research. As such, conventional scholarship falls trap of what Mexican intellectual Carlos Montemayor called the “covert discourse” of the Mexican police state, in which the strategy of naming domestic threats was already a constitutive aspect of the government’s war strategy. As the state manipulates the symptoms, Montemayor explains, it also profits from the promise of a solution: the concept of “social peace” promoted by the militarization is a key signifier erasing the systemic roots of the violence while masking the profoundly damaging effects of state violence (180–82). Mexico’s “drug war” discourse has been symbolically structured to justify the deployment of the state’s security apparatus which has in turn facilitated official extractive projects precisely in those areas most afflicted with violence. Dawn Paley and Simon Granovsky-Larsen have proposed the term “organized violence” to reassess this form of violence as “organized not only due to the formal structure of armed groups but also organized in its relationship to capitalism” (8). Against the prevailing assumption that the state retreats under neoliberal governance, Paley and Granovsky-Larsen observe the government in charge of setting “local conditions for capital accumulation and hold on tightly to their role as economic arbiters.” They argue that megaprojects and local community rights become mutually exclusive, and this explains why “the dual processes of security and rule of law for capital on the one hand, and insecurity and injustice for people and communities on the other, are, in fact, attractive to investors” (10). As an alternate concept, organized violence effectively fissures the dominant notion of “organized crime”. The latter has been the symbolic instrument of political and judicial discourse to operate a nomic resignification of entire communities. It offers not the legal configuration of criminal activity but the spatialization of crime as a political construct, transforming the targeted community into a battleground, as I will discuss next.

The “Northeastern Cartel” and its false positives: A case study On the morning of September 5, 2019, news about gunfire in the border city of Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, allegedly between drug traffickers from the “Northeastern Cartel” and official armed forces, circulated in local news channels. According to the Tamaulipas authorities, eight “sicarios,” five men and three women, first attacked state police agents who defended themselves and ultimately killed them inside an armored pick-up truck. In the following images made available by the police and then disseminated in social media, the alleged “sicarios” are seen in military-grade uniforms with the acronym “CDN,” identifying themselves as members of the “Cártel del Noreste,” the “Northeastern Cartel”. Police said that the group was part of a unit known as the “Troop from Hell”, the “armed branch” of the CDN (Infobae). Three days later, Kassandra Treviño, the 18-year-old daughter of one of the men executed, denounced that her father Severiano was in fact taken from their home by state police agents, who brutally beat him and forced him, in his own

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Figure 17.1 Images circulated in social media about the killing of eight alleged “sicarios” of the “Troop from Hell”, an armed group link to the “Northeastern Cartel”, later identified as civilians forced by state police agents to wear the militarystyle uniforms attributed to the group.

bedroom, to change his clothes into the military uniform that he was still wearing hours later when he and the other “sicarios” were found dead. Holding her infant child in arms, Kassandra was also beaten but then released. She was told to walk away and not look back or she and her child would be shot. The Nuevo Laredo Human Rights Committee, a civil organization, interviewed witnesses with similar claims regarding the other victims and denounced that the entire massacre was staged to manufacture another episode of Mexico’s “war on drugs”. A week later, the High Commissioner of Human Rights of the United Nations decided to hear and investigate the case, that some in the media already called a “false positive” (Zerega), referring to a recurrent tactic of the Colombian army, which reportedly murdered about 10,000 civilians between 2002 and 2010, disguising the extrajudicial killings as the result of confrontations with guerrilla combatants (Daniels). In rapid response, the majority in the Senate from Morena – the ruling political party – referred to the killing of eight “citizens” and not “sicarios,” denouncing the incident as an “extrajudicial execution,” in consequence with the federal government’s new security policy (Mercado). On January 30, 2019, about eight weeks

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after the inauguration of his presidency, President López Obrador announced the end to the “drug war,” that is, the immediate cease of all antidrug militarized efforts. Then on February 28, he achieved his most important political victory so far with almost unanimous congressional approval for the creation of a National Guard under civil command that is scheduled to replace all military security tasks within five years. Acting on campaign promises to demilitarize all anti-drug efforts, the AMLO government proposed the decriminalization of illegal drugs and a judicial process of amnesty for those who committed non-aggravated crimes under the current prohibitionist laws. There was, as expected, a strong reaction among governors, federal and state police, and even certain sectors of the Mexican army. Proceso magazine reported that the simulated “narco” confrontation in Nuevo Laredo took place nine days after Tamaulipas governor, Francisco Javier García Cabeza de Vaca, called on López Obrador to pledge a “joint strategy to end violence and insecurity” (Díaz). The notion of the “joint strategy” carries here a key significance in Mexico’s recent history. In 2006, then president Calderón followed a substantial expansion in public spending in security by militarizing his government to carry a “war against drugs” consisting of a national operation with 13 “joint strategies” between the federal government and those states most affected by the drug trade, according to combined US-Mexico military intelligence. There is now clear evidence, based on official data, that the deployment of thousands of soldiers and police agents broke a decade-long descent of homicides nationwide and in fact coincided with a dramatic surge in violence in those same regions occupied by federal armed forces.2 By pleading for yet another “joint strategy”, the governor of Tamaulipas seemed to be instigating a renewal of the logic of the federal government’s “war on drugs.” Let us briefly assess the numbers in the case in point: the simulated narco confrontation took place in the border city of Nuevo Laredo, in the state of Tamaulipas. As most of the states now associated with the “drug war”, Tamaulipas showed a steady decline in its homicide rate until the anti-drug strategy began. The most violent year before the militarization in nearly two decades had been 1992, with a total of 407 murders. The homicide rate fluctuated in the following years but with a descent in 2007 to a total of 189 murders, the least violent 12 months in 15 years (Escalante Gonzalbo, El homicidio, 27). The homicide rate then was 8.78 per 100 thousand inhabitants, below the national average of 8.78. When the militarized “joint strategy” began on February 18, 2007, it did not respond to a particularly violent scenario in Tamaulipas, but in fact occupied a state with significant less violence than, for example, the state of Mexico, where a historical homicide rate six times higher than Tamaulipas did not provoke military action. By 2010 there were a total of 721 homicides in Tamaulipas. That figure increased again in 2012 to a total of 1,562, a homicide rate of 29.75 per 100 thousand inhabitants. The only other state with such violence surge was Chihuahua. After a similar steady decline in murders from 1997 to 2007, Ciudad Juárez alone recorded a historic homicide rate of 250 per 100 thousand inhabitants in 2010, with a total of 3,622 killings, all while the militarization was supposed to be fighting drug cartels

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precisely to curb the violence (Fierro). In this discussion, as I argue in the following section, the phenomenon of forced displacement has been overlooked as most scholarship resorts to conventional approaches to the country’s high murder rates and the resulting waves of migration to the United States.

Forced internal displacement: The unaccounted collateral damage While homicides attributed to the “drug war” have logically received abundant media attention, the figures of internally displaced people remain scarcely understood in national debates. The Mexican Commission for the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights estimates a total of 338,405 people displaced by force in Mexico from 2006 to 2018 (Comisión, 15). Mexican-French anthropologist Séverine Durin is one of the few scholars who has approached the phenomena drawing from the concept of “forced migration,” coined by sociologist Stephen Castles. Updating the total figure of forced displacements, Durin counts approximately 345,000 people, mainly from the states of Chihuahua and Tamaulipas, who have been forced to leave their homes (Cedillo). The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has criticized the fact the Mexican government to date does not keep a rigorous methodology for accounting forced displacements. The most reliable global source is still the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center (IDMC), based in Geneva, whose figures closely followed those of the human rights organizations and scholars in Mexico and Latin America. In all of this research, however, there is one common denominator: the unchallenged, widely accepted cause of forced displacement in Mexico, which is the violence attributed to “drug cartels.” It is summarized in a 2012 report by the IDMC: Drug cartel violence in Mexico has increased dramatically since 2007, when the new government of President Felipe Calderón identified insecurity as a key problem and began deploying the military to fight the cartels in key locations. According to various analysts the strategy has backfired, stirring up a hornet’s nest by disturbing existing arrangements between the cartels, and sparking wars both within and between them. (Internal, 3) This report, as much of the scholarly on the topic, is entirely conditioned by the official logic of the “drug war” set forth since the militarization effort began. It records the surge in violence precisely the same year that the first “joint strategies” were launched, and yet it blames “cartels” for all the violence. And when it appears to be criticizing the federal government by pointing out that the militarization “backfired,” it ultimately confirms that “drug cartels” were the central agents responsible for the turmoil, uneducated brown men uncontrollably stinging civil society after their “hornet’s nest” was disturbed, as drug organizations are often illustrated in official and popular discourse. The ethnographic work of cultural

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studies specialists such as Ryan Rashotte and Shaylih Muelhmann, among others, is built upon this same imaginary of the Mexican “narco.” It reifies the classist and racialized narrative of “cartels” and their contradictory folkloric attributes, such as their sense of family and religious superstition, naïve consumerist aspirations, all with a hyper masculinity and psychotic tendencies that ultimately render them a wild, animalistic, threat. My analysis follows an important current of journalistic and scholarly work challenging the core claims of such official discourse by arguing that Mexico’s “drug war” must be understood as the public name of the military occupation instrumentalized, among other objectives, to open up vast regions of the country for transnational extractive practices of exploitation. Italian investigative reporter Federico Mastrogiovanni was among the first to denounce the preferred government practice of forced disappearances and displacement as a tool for energy extraction in northern Mexico. Among other findings, Mastrogiovanni examined the contradiction of the official discourse claiming that the “Los Zetas” cartel – a former military unit gone rogue – controlled Tamaulipas while transnational companies and the state’s political and business elites advanced megaprojects to tap into the Burgos Basin, the world’s fourth largest reserve of shale gas. Interviewing CEOs and engineers of energy conglomerates, Mastrogiovanni reported that transnational companies support friendly authoritarian governments deliberately instigating social unrest to depopulate entire regions and thus preempting any possibility of communal opposition. As “governments must compromise to allow high levels of violence, terror murder and disappearances,” Mastrogiovanni argued, “social tissue is dismembered along with the organization of the resistance” (36). Separate independent journalistic work points in the same direction. In the state of Coahuila, Mexican reporter Ignacio Alvarado linked the disappearance of nearly 2,000 people to an official “strategy to strip landowners and ranchers of large tracts of land in areas rich in gas, coal and water” (Alvarado). Following the money all the way to the California border, Proceso reporters Mathieu Tourliere and Arturo Rodríguez documented how San Diego-based transnational Sempra Energy, through political pressure and the systematic disregard of binational regulations and environmentalist laws, secured investments for the construction of the Los Ramones pipeline, one of the key infrastructure developments to extract shale gas from the Burgos Basin (Tourliere and Rodríguez). Part of the project was laid out in communal lands across Tamaulipas deep into the territory commonly presumed under “Los Zetas” control. But if we transpose the sites of extraction with the military occupation fighting the “drug war,” we will find that they decisively converge in the same northeastern regions of Mexico with the epicenter in the state of Tamaulipas. A map of alleged “influence” of the “Los Zetas” drug cartel, as described by El Universal newspaper in 2013. The shaded area covers the entire Yucatán peninsula, all the states at the Gulf of Mexico (Tabasco, Veracruz, and Tamaulipas) and the Northern border states of Nuevo León and Coahuila. This region coincides with the area of intense gas extraction conducted by multi-national energy

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Figure 17.2 Map of alleged “influence” of “Los Zetas”. Source: El Universal Newspaper: .

conglomerates with the approval of the Energy Secretariat of the Mexican federal government. Source: . A map of natural gas infrastructure and its corresponding multi-national extractive projects elaborated in 2016 by the Energy Secretariat of the Mexican federal government. The shaded areas indicate the 11 gas basins, including the Burgos basin, the world’s fourth largest gas extraction zone. Major private gas pipelines extend across Mexico’s northern border states (where “drug-related” violence has been consistently reported) reaching all the way to the rich city of Cancún in the Yucatán Peninsula. The gas basins and the pipelines combined cover almost identically the region allegedly under the control of the “Los Zetas” drug cartel. Source: . It is crucial to understand that México’s militarization and energy reform have been converging processes, both with the key financial and political support of the US government. Tourliere and Rodríguez reported that the negotiations on behalf of Sempra energy took place in 2011 at the US Embassy in México City, led by John D. Feeley, then undersecretary for the Western Hemisphere in Hillary Clinton’s State Department. Feeley is the same official who in December of 2008 headed the creation of the “Mérida Initiative,” a 1.6 billion aid package in equipment and training to help México “disrupt” the capacity of “organized crime” to

Figure 17.3 Official 2016 map of government extractive infrastructure of natural gas. Source: Mexico’s Energy Secretariat: .

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operate. Let us recall that in 2009, a year after President Barack Obama took office, Hillary Clinton’s State Department also created the Bureau of Energy Resources, a special office charged with the diplomatic strategy to accomplish energy reform in México, as documented in diplomatic cables published by Wikileaks (Horn). In 2010, as violence reached record highs in Tamaulipas and Chihuahua, Clinton compared Mexico’s “drug cartels” to Colombian insurgencies, claiming without any evidence, that in México “narco-traffickers controlled certain parts of the country” (Carroll). She then revealed that President Obama had considered a direct military intervention in México similar to President Bill Clinton’s “Plan Colombia”, including the deployment of US military personnel.

Land dispossession and forced displacement as neoliberal policy As the “drug trade” becomes the metaphor of the neoliberal extractive industry, scholar Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera has argued that the “Los Zetas cartel” operates as an extension of transnational interests, but far from being the main actors, the criminals act as a paramilitary force under the close direction of political and business elites of Tamaulipas and neighboring states. This model, according to Correa-Cabrera, is active in those regions under sieged by so-called “cartels” such as the “Caballeros Templarios” in the state of Michoacán, “Guerreros Unidos” in the state of Guerrero, and more recently the “Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación” in the state of Jalisco. Correa-Cabrera explains: Zones of potential resource extraction after energy reform have shown the highest levels of violence, experiencing first the arrival of criminal groups (following the Zeta model) and the militarization and paramilitarization of security, allegedly implemented as a response to “drug-related violence” and the so-called cartel wars. (158) It is important here to understand that “cartels” operate precisely in the logic of paramilitarism, a phenomenon that most scholars incorrectly link only to military juntas of outright authoritarian regimes of past decades, in particular during the Cold War era and the fight against global communism. As the governments of Calderón and Peña Nieto received the explicit financial and political backing of the United States, the question of paramilitarism is often erased, while the official narrative of “drug cartels” remains as the key factor to explain the violence. It is in this sense that “drug cartels” are usually seen as extra-state agents forming alternative criminal sovereignties in their territories. But if we follow the links between their activities and the extractive industries, “cartels” appear to be operating more like paramilitary forces, a “parallel state” conducting extra-legal actions to advance domestic and transnational interests of the political class and foreign conglomerates. Scholar J. Patrice McSherry defines the concept of the parallel state and its utility:

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Oswaldo Zavala The parallel state was an instrument to accomplish secretly what could not be accomplished legally or politically. It was created to carry out policies that violated all laws and norms and to circumvent any limits on the coercive power of the state, allowing the state to use extreme violence against “internal enemies” beyond all civilized boundaries, with no lawful constraints and with total impunity. Parallel state structures were “state owned,” but they were a deformation of a legitimate state. (21)

Historically, as McSherry argues, paramilitary forces recur to terror as a mechanism of social control, acting with loyalty to state structures but with varying degrees of autonomy, depending on political allegiances to the governing groups. Likewise, groups such as “Los Zetas” perform enforcement duties that directly benefit energy projects led by the federal government, but that may run counter to the interests of local municipalities and communal landowners. In fact, those duties are usually aimed at undoing local organizing in order to “open up” territories for the extractive industry. It is in this point where the phenomenon of the “false positives” denounced in Colombia seems to be operating as well within official Mexican armed forces as a tool to consolidate extractive projects. Land dispossession, as the result of massive forced displacements, is not just the effect of neoliberal policy ignoring labor law, eco-criticism, or land reform. It is driven by a militarized state that, in the name of “national security”, depopulates and appropriates territories ripe for extraction. Drawing from the work of Rosa Luxemburg, David Harvey contends that Marx’s principle of primitive accumulation, which “entailed taking land, say, enclosing it, and expelling a resident population to create a landless proletariat, and then releasing the land into the privatized mainstream of capital accumulation” (149) in the original – and violent – configuration of class difference, is still an ongoing process in the current late capitalist era. It allows for the relief of overaccumulation, that is, the condition in which stagnant capital surplus finds a way of fluidity and expansion in the outskirts of the capitalist system, in the external margins of the globalized economy. There, primitive accumulation is reenacted in a process that is better understood, according to Harvey, as “accumulation by dispossession.” In México, this process has been continuous since the adoption of neoliberal policy in the 1980s, the political and institutional transformation that put an end to the nationalist and protectionist state project which claimed sovereignty of natural resources with the 1938 expropriation of oil. Harvey explains: Mexico, for example, abandoned its already weakening protections of peasant and indigenous populations in the 1980s, in part under pressure from its neighbour to the north to adopt privatization and neo-liberal practices in return for financial assistance and the opening of the US market for trade through the NAFTA agreement. And even when the motivation appears predominantly internal, the external conditions matter. (154–55)

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In 2006, when US pressure turned into the active encouragement to militarize the country in order to declare a “war against drugs” – replaying the US-backed militarization of Colombia with the same stated objective in the 1990s – México commenced a violent form of dispossession perpetrated by its own armed forces. Harvey’s concept may be reframed here as “dispossession by militarization,” highlighting state violence as a component often disguised as normalized capitalist expansion. As México remains subjugated to its neighbor’s national security agenda, the United States actively manufactured the conditions of possibility for this new stage of dispossession. Harvey notes how for the principle of primitive accumulation to operate, “capitalism necessarily and always creates its own ‘other’” (141), that its, the outer limits of the system where dispossession ventilates capital surplus into new territories previously inaccessible for exploitation. Drug trafficking was indeed crafted as a global threat to “national security” in the 1980s during the Ronald Reagan administration, the pivotal mechanism that shifted all hostility away from the fading menace of international communism to the ubiquitous transitional presence of “cartels.” This reconfiguration took place along with the dawn of neoliberal reform in Latin America and it became another vehicle for the United States to secure its hegemony in the region.3 During the governments of Calderón and Peña Nieto, the last legal provisions impeding foreign investment in energy resources were dramatically eroded by the fog of the “drug war.” The most recent manifestation of this process took place on November 4, 2019, when three women and six children of the LeBaron family – a Mormon colony established in the northern state of Chihuahua since the 1920s – were brutally murdered, their bodies incinerated on a dirt road on the bordering state of Sonora. As the LeBaron clan keeps US citizenship, the story ran in mainstream media as the aggravated killing of an “American family,” decontextualizing the fact that the victims were in fact born in Mexico after several generations of a branches of the Mormon family established in the region primordially as Mexican citizens holding dual citizenship. The massacre was quickly explained in the media, without any forensic evidence or police investigation, as a “drug cartel ambush” (Chuck). President Donald Trump provided the full “national security” narrative from his twitter account a day after the incident, offering the Mexican government the “help” of a US military incursion in Mexico to fight “drug cartels”: Weeks later, the geopolitical implications of the case emerged: precisely at the border between the states of Chihuahua and Sonora, in the same region where the massacre took place, is located what may be the world’s largest reserve of lithium, the precious mineral dubbed as “the oil of the future” for its use for battery power for electronics, cars, airplanes, and even spacecrafts, the object of constant dispute between energy conglomerates across the planet. According to initial estimates yet to be verified, México’s lithium may reach 243 million tons that is already being explored by the Canadian firm Bacanora Lithium and the Chinese company Ganfeng Lithium. A telling comparison, México’s lithium may be 11 times larger than the Bolivian reserve, which according to numerous analysts may be one of the reasons behind the coup d’état against President Evo Morales in

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Figure 17.4 Message by President Donald Trump from his personal Twitter account in response to the November 4, 2019, massacre of nine members of the LeBaron family – a Mormon colony established in the state of Chihuahua – blamed on “drug cartels”. The LeBaron family has been involved in local political conflicts, including a dispute over water resources affecting the entire region.

November of 2019 (Carbajal). A few days after the massacre, over 100 members of the LeBaron family decided to abandon México, relocating temporarily in the United States. (Casanova). If the 19th-century dictum was “to govern is to populate”, 21st-century neoliberalism commands that “to extract is to depopulate.” As scholars, we tend to consider forced displacements as by-products of the illegal drug trade, when they be in fact the primary strategy and the daily mechanism of neoliberal governance. We do not think of them as interrelated processes because energy, security, and migration remain as separate objects of dominant binational public policy and consequently, and often with little resistance from our part, in academic research. The history of our current understanding of “drug trafficking,” the “war on drugs” and “narcoculture” is inscribed in the history of neoliberalism in México. But this history is not dependent on the rise of “cartels,” but on the deep transformation of México from a welfare to a neoliberal militarized state. It is within this transformation that the forced displacement of entire communities must be located, examined, and understood. It is also at this level that we must study the recent radical turn of President López Obrador’s security policy, even as he insists on the end of antidrug military operations. On May 11, 2020, in the midst of

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the COVID-19 pandemic, the AMLO issued a presidential decree authorizing the armed forces to “supplement” the national “national security” strategy under an ambiguous cooperation agreement between the civilian government and military command that will remain in force under a constitutional amendment until March 27, 2024, a period that covers practically the entirety of López Obrador's rule.4 His government has also designated the army and the navy to seize all operations of Mexico City's new airport, 49 customs checkpoints on the mainland, and 116 maritime customs stations. Because the country remains under the threat of “drugrelated violence”, it must now be in the hands of military power controlling who and what enters and leaves the country by land, sea, and air (Medellín). Most journalism and academic scholarship still focus on the casualties of the “drug war” either as the result of just another trafficker disputing the territory or as random victims of extortion, kidnapping, and murder as “cartels” supposedly diversify their activities, echoing recurrent claims by military intelligence reports. With scant pressure from civil society, the Mexican government to date does not keep a rigorous methodology to account for internally displaced people, doubly victimized by state violence and later by general indifference. Migrants and refugees, displaced by the militarization, are merely invisible residues of neoliberal governance life. In the most liquid way, they are forced into a continuous liminal state where they are never recognized and where their citizenship has simply dissolved. Scholars today face two urgent pending tasks: first, to discern the hidden geopolitical conditions of possibility of violence in México beyond the official “drug war” narrative, and second, to overcome our own inertia for understanding migration past conventional assumptions seeking to validate old and insufficient models observing the movement of people as the by-product of dysfunctional economies of developing countries. Forced displacement, a phenomenon barely studied in Mexico, is the direct result of a calculated strategy of paramilitary terror promoted by neoliberal governance advancing transnational interests. The links between energy, drug trafficking, and paramilitarism form together the urgent object for scholars in the social sciences and cultural studies as we experience an era of crude exploitation with complete disregard to human rights, international law, and national sovereignty. This is more than ever the time for a radical multidisciplinary effort engaged in a critical examination of security, hegemonic discourses criminalizing entire sectors of society, and the prevailing neoliberal rationale, all as a single field of study reconsidering the value of human life against the impersonal and degrading force of global capital.

Notes 1 See Zavala for a study on the link between the official narrative od the “drug war” and its mediation in recent journalism and cultural productions. 2 See Escalante Gonzalbo (“Homicidios 2008-2009”), Rodríguez Rejas, Espinosa, and Rubin. In their separate interventions, there is an established correlation between the militarization effort and the surge in Mexico’s national murder rate, but also separately in the homicides recorded in each state and municipality militarized.

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3 For more on the general question of the US security agenda in México and the rest of Latin America, see Rodríguez Rejas and José. 4 See the full text of the decree published in the Official Journal of the Federation on May 11, 2020: https://www.dof.gob.mx/nota_detalle.php?codigo=5593105&fecha=11 /05/2020.

Works cited Alvarado, Ignacio. “Terror in Coahuila: Gas Reserves Beneath Turf War in Northern Mexico?” Al Jazeera America. March 10, 2015. Bermúdez, Isaí Lara. “150 mil 992 ejecutados: la herencia de Peña.” Zeta. Dec. 3, 2018. Carbajal, Braulio. “Megayacimiento da a México boleto a la carrera del litio.” La Jornada. Dec. 5, 2019. Carroll, Rory. “Hillary Clinton: Mexican Drugs Was Is Colombia-Style Insurgency.” The Guardian. Sep. 9, 2010. Casanova, Stephanie. “Days after Cartel Kills 9, Community Flees Mexico.” Tucson.com . Nov. 11, 2019. Cedillo, Juan Alberto. “Desplazamientos forzados, el oculto resultado de la violencia: Ciesas.” Proceso. Sept. 14, 2018. Chuck, Elizabeth. “Slain U.S. Citizens Were Part of Mormon offshoot with Sordid History.” NBC News. Nov. 9, 2019. Comisión Mexicana de Defensa y Promoción de los Derechos Humanos, A.C. P. “Episodios de desplazamiento interno forzado masivo en México.” Informe. 2018. Correa-Cabrera, Guadalupe. Los Zetas Inc. Criminal Corporations, Energy, and Civil War in Mexico. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017. Daniels, Joe Parkin. “Colombian Army Killed Thousands More Civilians Than Reported, Study Claims.” The Guardian. May 8, 2018. Díaz, Gloria Leticia. “Tamaulipas: soldados y policías se habrían coordinado para asesinar.” Proceso. Sept. 14, 2019. Escalante Gonzalbo, Fernando. El homicidio en México entre 1990 y 2007. Aproximación estadística. México: El Colegio de México, 2009. Escalante Gonzalbo, Fernando. “Homicidios 2008–2009. La muerte tiene permiso.” Nexos. Jan. 3, 2011. Espinosa, Valeria and Donald B. Rubin. “Did the Military Interventions in the Mexican Drug War Increase the Violence?” The American Statistician, 69.1 (2015): 17–27. Fierro, Juan Omar. “Tamaulipas: 6 años de violencia continua, más de 4,500 muertos.” Aristegui Noticias. July 11, 2016. Harvey, David. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Horn, Steve. “Exclusive: Hillary Clinton State Department Emails, Mexico Energy Reform and the Revolving Door.” The Huffington Post. Aug. 9, 2016. Infobae. “‘La Tropa del Infierno’: la sanguinaria facción del Cártel del Noreste que aterroriza a Tamaulipas.” Sept. 5, 2019. Internal Displacement Monitoring Center. “Forced Displacement Linked to Transnational Organised Crime in Mexico.” May 2012. Kenny, Paul and Mónica Serrano, Eds. Mexico’s Security Failure. Collapse into Criminal Violence. New York: Routledge, 2012. Mastrogiovanni, Federico. Ni vivos ni muertos. La desaparición forzada en México como estrategia de terror. Mexico: Random House, 2016.

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McSherry, J. Patrice. Predatory States. Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America. Ofxord: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2005. Medellin, Jorge A. “The Mexican Army Assumes Control of the Country’s Customs.” Defense. July 20, 2020. Mercado, Angélica. “Morena pedirá desaparición de poderes en Guanajuato y Tamaulipas.” Milenio. Sept. 23, 2019. Montemayor, Carlos. La violencia de Estado en México. Antes y después de 1968. Mexico: Random House, 2010. Muelhmann, Shaylih. When I Wear my Alligator Boots. Narco-Culture in the U.S. Mexico Borderlands. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2014. Nájar, Alberto. “Violencia en México: el récord de homicidios en 2019 durante el primer año de gobierno de AMLO.” BBC News Mundo. Jan. 21, 2020. Paley, Dawn and Simon Granovsky-Larsen. Organized Violence. Capitalist Warfare in Latin America. Regina: University of Regina Press, 2019. Pansters, Will G., Benjamin T. Smith and Peter Watt, Eds. Beyond the Drug War in Mexico. Human Rights, the Public Sphere and Justice. New York: Routledge, 2018. Rashotte, Ryan. Narco Cinema. Sex, Drugs and Banda Music in Mexico’s B-Filmography. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Rodríguez, Rejas and María José. La norteamericanización de la seguridad en América Latina. México: Akal, 2017. Tourliere, Mathieu and Arturo Rodríguez. “Ya está aquí Sempra Energy, sus presiones, sus sobornos.” Proceso. Aug. 9, 2014. Zavala, Oswaldo. Los cárteles no existen. Narcotráfico y cultura en México. México: Malpaso, 2018. Zerega, Georgina. “Los falsos positivos de Tamaulipas.” El País. Sept. 24, 2019.

18 Migration and the aging body Elderly war refugees in Brazil between national borders and social boundaries Bahia M. Munem

In January 2019, less than two weeks post-inauguration, far-right President Jair Bolsonaro announced that Brazil would no longer participate in the United Nations Migration Accord. Bolsonaro declared via Twitter, “Brazil has a sovereign right to decide whether or not it accepts migrants,” and then stated, “Not just anyone can come into our home” (Londoño 2019). The move to pull out of the accord came shortly after it had been adopted by the UN General Assembly.1 Unsurprisingly, the Trump administration also refused to endorse the pact, which aims to provide a comprehensive approach to international migration and improved intergovernmental cooperation in light of the sizable movement of migrants and refugees propelled by war, political instability, and natural disaster. In fact, in August 2019, in a move to further narrow the entry of migrants into the country and reduce the ability to gain permanent residency, acting director of the Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), Ken Cuccinnelli announced that the Trump administration would implement a “public charge” rule in determining admission into the United States and in granting green-cards to those already in the country. This new policy would ensure that those without financial resources could not remain and become reliant on the government for subsistence, regardless of whether their documents were in order.2 After being blocked by judges in lower courts in three states,3 the administration scored a victory in a 5-4 Supreme Court decision in late January 2020 which allowed the “wealth test” to stand.4 While financial status is an obvious determinant, age, health, education, and skills are primary factors in making assessments.5 This ranking of who is worthy, “not just anyone” as Bolsonaro put it, is not a new phenomenon in immigration regimes nor in humanitarian governance, despite the recently garnered attention and rising anti-immigrant populism. Hierarchies of worthiness predicated on self-sufficiency and triaging of desirable bodies have long been mired in these logics. What then becomes of the elderly and infirm in these displacements, mobilities, and selections? How are bodies that are perceived as a burden with little capacity for “traditional” integration managed? How are migratory categories (migrant, asylum seeker, refuge, etc.) arbitrarily deployed to decide claims in receiving states? Utilizing a case study of Iraq War refugees resettled in Brazil, I will address these questions and demonstrate how the Brazilian state has managed aging and infirm

Migration and the aging body 241 refugees and show how granting asylum is conditioned by a humanitarian calculus nested within an economic logic – seeking those who are “fit” in terms of market potential. Faced with the presence of elderly refugees, and without social public policies aimed at this population, resettlement organizations have oscillated between proposals for institutional confinement of elders and making their families accountable for their well-being. I will also show how the displaced persons use their material-aged and ailing bodies, and their protracted status of refugees, as a means of protesting and resisting the status quo in Brazilian public policy by arousing discourses of deservedness and judicializing their rights as non-citizen subjects. In a humanitarian overture in 2008, Brazil granted asylum to a group of just over 100 Palestinian-Iraq War refugees who had been languishing in a “temporary” UNHCR administered refugee camp (Ruweished) in the Jordan-Iraq border for nearly five years. They had fled Baghdad during the US invasion and were denied entry into Jordan since they were recognized as stateless and only had refugee documents (RDs). If allowed into Jordan, they could not be repatriated like Iraqi nationals and would have to remain there. Among them were single elders without families, in ill health, and for whom Brazil marked a third or fourth displacement. There were also elders who were part of fully constituted families. Based on extensive ethnographic research over several years, I explore how refugees negotiate and challenge Brazilian discourses of “integration” and belonging and analyze the perception, reception, and (dis)incorporation of resettled elderly and infirm refugees in the country. The resettlement of Iraq War refugees in Brazil was based on a tripartite agreement. Two Catholic NGOs, Cáritas Brasileira and Associação Antônio Vieira (ASAV), in collaboration with the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and Brazil’s National Committee for Refugees (CONARE), were charged with overseeing the process. They were responsible for arranging direct services, such as medical care, housing, language courses, and for facilitating integration into local communities. The Brazilian overture to these specific refugees also bypassed the normative selection procedures by which a host nation chooses persons for whom to provide refuge. Usually a background check and interview are conducted to determine if individuals are “good” candidates for asylum. Cristina, a representative from ASAV, described how the process works: Normally we conduct an interview mission. We go there…for example, to Ecuador, Costa Rica, Panama, in the case of Colombian [refugees] and review the cases that are being presented to Brazil. Then we conduct interviews and bring cases back and they are presented to the committee. That’s the procedure: we go there first, to the place of asylum, interview, bring back to Brazil, present [the cases], then each is either accepted or not. The acceptance is not about choosing refugees, or if one is more or less of a refugee; it is about where and how they can be integrated in Brazil. So, if a family has three or four elderly people, with chronic health problems, a lot of times it’s not recommended that they come to Brazil. Because in Brazil we even have

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The asylum interview functions as an evaluation to determine whether specific persons are capable of being integrated into Brazilian society, with an emphasis on those who are able-bodied and without excessive needs. While on the one hand the selection process is enshrined in humanitarianism, it also operates within a neoliberal framework in that there is an assessment of the refugee’s employability and potential for self-sufficiency. And this is quite similar to the “public charge” rule in the United States with which I opened this chapter. In this way, selection of refugees mimics neoliberal practices of determining desirable and undesirable bodies by what anthropologist Aihwa Ong calls “marketable talents” (2006, 16). She asserts, “Low-skill citizens and migrants become exceptions to neoliberal mechanisms and are constructed as excludable populations in transit…[C]ertain rights and benefits are distributed to bearers of marketable talents and denied those who are judged to lack such capacity or potential” (Ibid). Refugees who do not display these labor prospects (i.e., under-educated, minimal work skills, ailing, elderly, etc.) are often viewed as a burden. The potential for selection increases for an individual if resettlement proves mutually beneficial, rather than those whose aged and/or disabled bodies mark them as socially dis-integratable. Sociologists Mike Featherstone and Mike Hepworth assert, “as people become elderly and unable to reciprocate and perform responsibilities they are forced to withdraw from powerful social roles and lose prestige” (1991, 386). We are reminded here that a form of social-political dismemberment occurs with the elderly in what would be considered the “normal” life-course, but this also occurs within the context of refugee placement. The perceived bodily, social, and economic inabilities of the aged to integrate and participate impact the asylum decision. Brazil does not resettle the ailing and/or elderly precisely because of their perceived debility. Despite the humanitarian claims for taking in refugees, the way the ill and elderly are incorporated into the system’s calculus sheds light on Brazilian public policy more broadly and the constitutive nationalism that shapes it. In having refugee status, the resettled persons in Brazil could not be absorbed into social benefits programs for which permanent residency or citizenship were required. Instead, funding for a monthly living stipend, housing stipend, and money for language classes came from UNHCR, for the duration of the two years of assistance, and not the Brazilian government. Conversely, had they been granted permanent residency immediately upon arriving, they could not have qualified for funding provided by UNHCR since funding is only allotted to those with refugee status.6 The state, in accordance to its constitutional obligation,7 provided the refugees with access to healthcare through the country’s universal healthcare, Sistema Único de Saúde (SUS). However, as Cristina emphasized above, refugees with chronic health problems raise concerns since they require more intensive and long-term investment than what might be readily available under the SUS.

Migration and the aging body 243 The general coordinator for CONARE, Renato Zerbini, corroborated Cristina’s account of the resettlement policy. He noted that Brazil generally did not resettle elderly refugees. Exceptions are only made in the case of family reunification, where an individual who has been resettled wants to bring an elderly parent. In such cases, the requestee assumes full responsibility for the elder family member. However, in the case of the Palestinian refugees, according to Zerbini, Brazil’s “inherent humanitarian impulse” rightfully superseded these rules. “They would have died [in the desert]” had Brazil not made its humanitarian overture. In this declaration, Zerbini engages with Georgio Agamben’s “bare life” or “life exposed to death” (1998, 88) by asserting there were no political aims, dimensions, or considerations involved. Instead, resettling elderly refugees was simply meant to spare them from certain death. But this then begs the question: What responsibility does the Brazilian state have to sustain the lives it spared? Representatives from UNHCR acknowledged the elderly refugee caseload posed an “unexpected challenge,” a senior agent disclosed, and “a real durable solution for them” was still being explored (Interview, June 23, 2010). The country’s social economic nets were not readily available to them, because they had no work history in Brazil and had not contributed to Social Security or a pension. Accessing other social programs was contingent upon being Brazilian born or a naturalized citizen, such as the federal program for elderly and disabled persons with limited income, Benefício de Prestação Continuada de Assistência Social (BPC-LOAS). This program, similar to Supplemental Security Income (SSI) in the United States, does not require prior contribution and “guarantees a minimum monthly salary to a disabled and/or elderly person who can prove not to be selfsufficient or have family support” (BPC). Regardless of the vulnerable and precarious conditions in which migrants might find themselves, however, government assistance is denied – even if the policy runs contrary to the constitutional guarantee of equality between nationals and foreigners stipulated in Article 5: “All are equal before the law, without distinction of any kind, guaranteeing to Brazilians and foreigners residing in the country the inviolable right to life, liberty, equality, security and property” (Lei 9474/97).

The elderly & zones of diasporic isolation It was clear there was no precedent or structure in place for resettling the elderly and ill, who were referred to as vulnerable cases. As one senior UNHCR resettlement agent in Brasília noted: Brazil was not used to the fact that elders would be without families. Some elders came by themselves and that's a challenge that we have been working on with the communities and CONARE… Because it’s one thing to help the elder and to identify the social services for them, but the problem is when you have no family support, it's almost impossible to find a solution. (Carol, UNHCR Brazil representative. Interview. June 23, 2010)

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Here a neoliberal logic is attached to Foucault’s concept of governmentality, revealing the processes by which populations, specifically elderly Palestinian refugees, were managed in Brazil. Where self-care and self-sufficiency prove difficult, the family is to become accountable for social risks. The resettlement agent indicated that the Brazilian nation-state, through its social policies, removes the responsibility of care from its domain and obligates families for that care. Foucault traces the medicalization of the family beginning in the eighteenth century (1980, 172–175). He posits that children’s health and wellness became a central objective of the family during this period in order to ensure their survival to adulthood. The family is no longer to be just a system of relations inscribed in a social status, a kinship system, a mechanism for the transmission of property. It is to become a dense, saturated, permanent, continuous physical environment which envelops, maintains and develops the child’s body. (1980, 172) The move toward medicalization was intended to secure the utility of the eventual adult in economic processes and to ensure the family bore the “moral” and financial responsibility for medical care (Ibid, 174). By extending Foucault’s analysis, one can see how the “medicalization of the family” is compatible with the neoliberal state. Where children become the focus for the benefit of the larger economy, those children as adults would assume responsibility for their aged and/or infirm parents – an investment in care in a young body yields a return investment in the care of an aging and/or ill body. This idea is codified in Brazilian law and reinforced by nongovernmental institutions.8 In the absence of families, the tenuous condition of protections offered by the state become pronounced. Four elderly men who arrived in São Paulo without family members were placed in a nursing home. Within days of being there, they demanded their own homes. A fiercely independent 65-year-old (who presented as much older), Faris, resented the regimented guidelines of the facility and thought the very idea of being there was an affront to his personhood. He perceived it to be a place for those who could not govern themselves. Furthermore, he had lived in a confined and policed refugee camp for nearly five years and resisted any semblance of spatial confinement. Being unable to eat when he wanted to or cook his own meals, something he took great pleasure in, aggravated the situation. The UNHCR representative, however, referred to this as a “cultural” issue. Culturally speaking, they did not accept to be there. They wanted to be independent, with their own places, their own houses. Although we tried to have them in a place where they would receive care, culturally [original emphasis] it was not accepted. (Carol, UNHCR representative. Interview, June 23, 2010)

Migration and the aging body 245 To make sense of their resistance to being placed in a nursing home, the agent attributed the elders’ discontent to cultural differences, instead of a resistance to institutionalization as such. Autonomy, in different scales, is a ubiquitous theme in the theater of elderly life and one that is not indicative of the refugees’ “culture.” For Faris it was about being treated “fairly” and “with dignity” as he put it. Of the four elderly men, three were able to leave the nursing home and were granted their own apartments. The fourth, Sami, was deemed by UNHCR incapable of living independently because he was said to display signs of dementia. Sami was 68 years old when he arrived in Brazil. He was one of few resettled Iraq War refugees actually born in Palestine. His family was dispossessed from Haifa in 1948 and given refuge in Iraq, where he lived until being displaced by the US incursion in 2003. He had never had a formal education, had never been married, and worked as a farmhand for the better part of his life. While living in the nursing home, Sami ran away several times. Each time he found his way to the local mosque a few miles away and claimed he did not want to return. He felt isolated since he did not speak Portuguese and had no one with whom to communicate. The people with whom Sami lived in the nursing home thought he was clever and understood and learned quickly, but claimed they were the ones who could not understand him. JC, one of the residents there said, “I felt very sorry for him because he had problems with the food here.” Pointing to a mulberry tree a few meters away, he indicated Sami would eat the unripe fruit from it to quell his hunger. In a phone call (December 19, 2010) with the nursing home director to get her perspective on Sami’s stay there, she immediately invoked a nationalist discourse regarding the resettled refugees generally and later condemned the government for allowing it. “They demanded much more than they deserved…Sami received more assistance than the Brazilians who are in the nursing home.” The director quickly erected an “Us” versus “Them” framework that hinged on “worthiness.” Ana Ramos-Zayas deploys the concept of the “politics of worthiness” to capture the insistence that Puerto Ricans, especially the poor, “prove their deservingness of US citizenship in order to be legitimately entitled to civil rights and social benefits that other…populations can assume as inalienable” (2004, 35). She reminds us of the hierarchies of citizenship and the scales of social and political disenfranchisement of racialized others. Although the refugees certainly were not citizens, they were expected to prove they were worthy of social benefits. However, their worthiness could not compete with the deserving and imagined Brazilian nationals themselves. The director claimed, “Sami went on hunger strikes many times, principally after visiting with other refugees. He did not have preferential treatment at the home. He ought to eat everything the others ate”. “Did that mean pork too, which was religiously forbidden?” I asked. She responded, “they don’t even cook that meat in there.” However, Sheikh Hamdi, the imam from the mosque, thought this was not true since Sami would often ask him to pray over religious transgressions, for which the imam believed eating pork was one.

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The director concluded our conversation by saying, “these resettled [people] received far more than Brazilians themselves. I do not agree with the government, which granted more to the refugees than to nationals. This is not something Brazilian.” The director’s nationalist discourse suggested that in providing what she perceived as more (more financial assistance, more benefits, more general support) to the Palestinian refugees, the state was guilty of denying resources to its legitimate “deserving” citizenry. This was not only a betrayal but also an affront to the very meaning of Brazilianness. This is similar to the current discourse deployed by US government officials to deny assistance to poor migrants because it comes at the expense of tax-paying, worthy citizens. Without knowing the origin of the funds for the refugees more broadly, nor the origin of funds for Sami’s stay in the nursing home specifically, and despite the wide socioeconomic divisions between the rich and poor in Brazil, the director “imagined” a unified nation undermined by unworthy outsiders. This brings to the foreground what Benedict Andersen writes in Imagined Communities, “[the nation] is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship” (2006 [1983], 7). In this case, it is not clear whether the director “always” conceived of Brazil this way, but she used this imaginary to chastise those she assumed provided more benefits to Sami, and refugees, over Brazilian citizens. Sami stayed in the nursing home just about a year. The social isolation he experienced was evident. After several attempts to run away and insisting on not wanting to be there anymore, a legal activist got involved in his case and removed him from the home, claiming Sami was forcibly held captive. He left São Paulo altogether and went to Brasília. There he met four other Palestinian refugees (three of whom were elderly men who had been in the same nursing home with him), who were camped out in front of UNHCR. All claimed they were not able to integrate into Brazilian society, had been neglected healthcare, and demanded to be resettled in another country because Brazil was not able to ensure their rights to adequate medical care.

Their bodies/their protests The space outside UNHCR headquarters became an ongoing site of protest. UNHCR (by way of Cáritas) suspended all assistance to those protesting in Brasília. They claimed the refugees had willingly left their cities of resettlement and therefore abandoned the resettlement program. Now they would no longer be entitled to any of the monthly assistance previously provided by the UN agency. Meanwhile, the refugees claimed the program, by not providing adequate services and necessary medical care, had in fact abandoned them. Despite the suspension of funds, the refugees asserted continued their protests.9 They fortified their encampment in front of UNHCR with tents and even an improvised stove, where Faris would often cook. The resettlement coordinator from ASAV, Cristina, reflected on the comedictragedy of the situation: “No, it was fantastic. We would get there and there was

Migration and the aging body 247 Faris, cutting onions on the ground. They would make it there, fried onions with bread.” The UNHCR office was located in a rented house in an upper-middleclass suburb of Brasília’s Federal District, Lago Sul. The neighbors on the block found only tragedy in the predicament. While visiting the site where the protest had been, a woman who lived across the street from the encampment recounted: They stayed almost one year. By then there were only three here, but in a ghastly condition. Here we could not even walk, it seemed like it was their home...We were scared. To come here to talk to the neighbor, I came by car…because I did not have the courage to walk through here. They were living here with filth…And they were evil-looking. It was a horror. A horror! It was just a movement to make some demands. But the thing dragged on. (Marta. Interview. June 24, 2010) The neighbor made what appeared to be a layered observation when she likened the manner in which the protestors occupied the public sidewalk in this upper-class neighborhood as being comparable to being in “their [own] home.” On the one hand, the political nature of the protest was hollowed out of her assessment and cast into the private domestic sphere. On the other, the protestors were co-opting space that was not theirs and which was geared toward a specific, more agreeable, more [socioeconomically] deserving “public.” Moreover, Marta’s description of the protest site as being filthy and simultaneously appearing “like it was their home,” not only made an assessment about how the refugees would have lived in a home, but also attributes a certain comfort to their situation of being home-less. Despite citing fear, indicative of a broad and common Orientalist trope, when asked if she or anyone else had ever been threatened in any way, Marta explained, “Threatened, no. But it was constraining…a person who does not speak the language, is not well perceived, and they knew they were not…A degrading, disgusting situation…One year with such a situation!” For the people who lived on the block, the camped-out refugees were unsightly and troubled the suburban landscape and sound-scape. They even transformed the usual odors emanating from the neighborhood by cooking food outdoors. They thus managed to significantly reconfigure the space they occupied, which was an affront to the neighborhood’s class sensibilities. There was a clear and growing tension between the refugees seeking visibility and their unsightliness as perceived by the neighborhood residents. As the protest continued, the refugees’ bodies were seen as excess: excessively old, idle, “evil looking,” demanding, needy, and therefore ultimately undesirable. They were at once confined by and spilling over their own corporeality. Moreover, the neighbor characterized the people in the encampment through essentialist ideas of Arabness and Muslimness, animated by Orientalist trappings of cultural others. To her these were indicators of what she considered as the refugees’ stubborn disposition and irrational demands and behavior. As such, Marta thought the refugees should have been left in the desert camp where they had been before coming to Brazil.

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Judicializing claims While still in protest, the refugees began to explore ways in which they could have their monthly assistance reinstated. They began a process to judicialize “the right to health” and rights to social benefits. It was a means to make themselves legible to the state and hold it accountable for rights codified in federal law. Judicializing claims allowed the refugees to engage in practices of citizenship by using the state’s instruments on their behalf and point to incongruencies in the state’s legal body. Despite UNHCR being considered a UN “Specialized Agency,” with “privileges and immunities,” over which state courts have no jurisdiction, given that the resettlement program in Brazil is a tripartite pact, which also involves the Brazilian state, via CONARE, the attorney who represented the Palestinian refugees continued to file petitions requesting an investigation. This together with the media attention the refugees were garnering for their protest ensured broader awareness of the situation. While the Attorney General had no jurisdiction over UNHCR, she made firm recommendations to the head of CONARE to reinstate the refugees’ monthly assistance and based her finding on the responsibility the Brazilian government had for the “human rights” of refugees as codified in Federal Law 9474/97, Estatuto dos Refugiados.10 After months of deliberation, UNHCR made an official commitment to reinstate monthly stipends. By then a lot had changed for the elderly protestors. The three remaining were forcibly removed from their encampment. Marta, the neighbor, recounted the events. [The Police] came at 6 in the morning on a Saturday. It was horrible. It was sad. Even though I wanted them gone, I was very upset. I couldn’t even sleep. It was something really bad, you know? Because it was not how we wanted it to be resolved. It really was by force. But there wasn’t a solution. It was what needed to be done. It was affecting our community here, right? (Marta. Interview. June 24, 2010) A judge ordered their removal and claimed the encampment was a health and environmental hazard and posed a risk to the residents. While the refugees were judicializing their rights, so were the elite neighbors. An armed military guard remained on the street for nearly three weeks to ensure the protestors would not return. By then the UNHCR office had moved to an undisclosed location. Meanwhile, the refugees decided to take their protest to a site where they would have more visibility. They protested in front of the Ministry of Foreign Relations (Itamaraty). Although they were few in number,11 they “refused invisibility” and worked diligently to center their presence by demonstrating in a highly visible political site. In “Refusing Invisibility” (2008), Ilana Feldman mines the artifacts of visibility through which Palestinians articulate themselves and make claims, such as the use of Palestinian flags. She argues, “to see one was to be forced to recognize the presence of not simply ‘Arabs’ but ‘Palestinians’” (2008, 504). The refugees used the Palestinian flag as a visual marker to make claims for what they were being denied. Together with their elderly bodies, this symbol also produced

Migration and the aging body 249 a particular temporality of refugeeness since the protracted status of Palestinian refugees was etched on their aged, material bodies.12 One of the refugees who had been consistently in protest and had spent the latter part of his 30s in the desert camp was eager to start his life anew in Brazil. Rawi was very critical of the resettlement program and the UN Refugee Agency. He explained UNHCR’s role this way: “They are rich people. They are the merchants and we are the goods. They are living the high life and we cannot live” (Interview. July 13, 2010). He thought the program was poorly executed and was a program only in name. His hopes were especially dashed when he realized there were not many job opportunities, nor a workforce integration component in the resettlement. Rawi was clearly conscious of class dynamics between personnel who administered the program and refugees who received services. In managing the program and refugees, UNHCR personnel earned significant salaries, whereas refugees earned a meager monthly stipend not equivalent to a living wage. Moreover, Rawi’s analysis encompassed a broader critique of humanitarianism itself, where a lucrative economy is built on the ruins of lives. He reflected, “Here in (Brazil) it is too difficult. The old people, they cannot work, and they have no money to spend. So, what will they do? This is the big question.” At this point the refugees in Brasília wanted to leave the country and after more than a year, the protests phased out. One elder died of pneumonia, which prompted UNHCR to consider re-resettlement for the remaining three. The three suggested being placed back into a camp. They thought by going back into a refugee camp there would be improved prospects for placement somewhere offering better living conditions for the elderly than in Brazil. At the very least, they thought it would be better if they were in a predominantly Arabic-speaking country, even if this meant dealing with the dismal, precarious conditions in camps. Space anthropologist Julie Peteet claims refugee camps are contradictory spaces. They can be desperate places with wretched living conditions, but they “could be seen…as places where possibilities for the future emerged, took shape, and were acted upon” (Peteet 2005, 131). In other words, camps are not envisioned as final destinations but as transitional places where hope for a better life and future could be cultivated through creative organizing and political action. For the elderly protestors, even the encampment in Brasília could be seen through this lens. It provided them with a sense of new possibilities in what they otherwise perceived as a hopeless situation. Therefore, going back into a refugee camp, despite the inevitable precarious conditions, signified hope and potential. The case the elderly Palestinian Iraq War refugees brought to the judiciary also underscored the lack of accountability of the Brazilian state and the necessity for its active engagement. This became even more evident when UNHCR Brazil did in fact attempt to gain permission to place the refugees back into an outpost on the border of Syria and Iraq. The Syrian government denied the request, which, on the eve of what was to become Syria’s enduring Civil War, proved reasonable. The elderly men remained in Brasília, receiving monthly assistance from UNHCR indefinitely as vulnerable cases.

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By examining the fault lines in Brazil’s healthcare and social benefits programs, as they relate to elderly and ill refugees, the uneven access to state programs between nationals and non-nationals becomes visible. They demonstrate the discrepancies between granting resettlement and the viability of integrating refugees into local society. The refugees in making demands, claiming rights, and staging scenes of dissensus, asserted themselves as political subjects, performed citizenship and pushed back on what James Holston calls “ideologies and conventions of inclusion” in Brazilian society (2008, 284). These discourses that purport “universally inclusive membership” are not only ruptured at the level of the individual, but the state itself unravels the very discourses it seeks to advance by pointing to the limits it has created and codified in law. In navigating and contesting the multi-tentacled systems of the state where they were erased because of their non-citizen status, the refugees with their aging and sick bodies etched themselves into visibility and contested the Brazilian nativist-nationalism tightly woven into the fabric of the judiciary.

On categories By December 2018, a total of 80,057 people had applied for asylum in Brazil. The highest number to date. Despite establishing in 1997 the first comprehensive refugee law in South America, its geographic size, and still touted mythology of harmonious plurality, until then, there had been just over 11,200 people recognized as refugees by the country’s national refugee committee, CONARE. But on December 5, 2019, even with his animus toward migrants, calling refugees “the scum of the earth”13 before becoming president and pulling Brazil from the UN Migration Accord, Bolsonaro’s administration agreed to recognize 21,000 Venezuelan asylum seekers as refugees – nearly tripling in a single day the previous number (Muñoz and Broner 2019).14 Why this disjuncture from the man who has been dubbed “Trump of the Tropics”? The vast majority of the funding for this endeavor is from the US government, which has provided more than a quarter billion dollars in aid to countries giving refuge to sizable numbers of Venezuelan asylum-seekers, such as Brazil, Colombia, and Peru (USAID).15 The demographics of the refugees in Brazil still haven’t been fully disclosed, but many had been living in precarious encampments in the border city of Pacaraima in the country’s northernmost state of Roraima, with food insecurity and health concerns. Given the tenuous social benefits infrastructure I outline above, it is uncertain how the newcomers will fair in accessing medical and other services – especially those who are elderly and/or ailing. Nonetheless, Brazil’s response stands in stark distinction from that of the United States with asylum seekers on its southern border. What is notable too is while the United States has provided millions in aid to countries housing Venezuelans in Latin America, it has repeatedly denied them entry into its own territory. Nazanin Ash from the International Rescue Committee (IRC) highlighted the contradiction. “Here you have the administration standing with Venezuelans seeking freedom – and banning them from seeking that freedom in the United States” (Holpuch 2019). This could be

Migration and the aging body 251 seen as a strategy for the Trump administration to support displaced Venezuelans by proxy without giving them refuge, especially given its response to migrants from Latin America petitioning for asylum and now implementing a “wealth test” as a rubric to determine who is qualified to remain in the country. However, this new established assessment that makes permanent residency in the United States conditioned by financial solvency, age, health, education, and skills is said to exempt certain “classes of immigrants,” such as refugees (USCIS).16 This underscores the importance of the naming conventions that categorize people in flux. In the United States, migrants or economic migrants (documented or undocumented) as a designation, especially for Central Americans, has been used even for those who meet the criteria for refugee status (Menjívar & Abrego 2012). For instance, Salvadorans who fled a civil war in the 1980s largely fomented by the United States’ political and material support of a military regime, were granted Temporary Protected Status (TPS) instead of political asylum (Abrego 2014, 13–15). TPS does not offer a path to permanent residency and must be renewed every 18 months. The precarity of this status was revealed in 2018 when the Trump administration vowed not to renew TPS for over 300,000 people effective September 2019, impacting nearly 200,000 Salvadorans.17 Refugees, however, have alleged protections by institutions of global governance. But as I have shown, these protections are futile when national policies, such as Brazil’s, disproportionately impact impoverished elderly refugees and are carefully implemented to distinguish between desirable and undesirable groups, such as in the United States.

Conclusion The latest report (June 2019) on global forced displacement released by UNHCR reveals 70.8 million people had been displaced worldwide,18 an over 2 million increase from the previous year. Of these, approximately 10 percent are elderly with special needs. The two most commonly referenced challenges that the aged and infirm encounter in displacement is access to healthcare and public support structures. Although this is a looming issue, it is often elided in migration studies. Instead, refugee camps, for instance, are often places depicted by scurrying youth with bodily vigor, filled with potentiality and futurity. However, in a moment of continued mass forced migration, these representations are not consistent, and perhaps never have been, with the reality of those who cross or are forced to cross borders. As I have demonstrated in the case study of elderly Palestinian Iraq War refugees in Brazil, while enshrined in humanitarian logics, selection processes and resettlement operate within a neoliberal framework of self-reliance. The ability to “carry their own weight” has long been a means to evaluate refugees and immigrants alike. These practices align with current measures by far-right leaders to deter border crossings and overhaul immigration systems, even if a nation-state, like the United States, has had a significant hand in displacing millions through direct military action and foreign policy. Because of this, a deeper examination of how the elderly and infirm factor in human mobilities and

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emplacement must be undertaken to address the lacuna in research. This would yield a more robust understanding of the dynamics and challenges in experiences of migration.

Notes 1 The groundwork for the accord was drafted at the seventieth UN General Assembly in September 2016 and titled The New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants. The finalized accord is titled The Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration (GCM). See: https://www.iom.int/global-compact-migration 2 The full August announcement is available in the Federal Register and can be accessed here: https://federalregister.gov/d/2019-171422019-17142 3 New York, California, and Washington. See: https://www.npr.org/2019/10/11/7693 76154/n-y-judge-blocks-trump-administrations-public-charge-rule. Trump signed a proclamation in early October 2019, barring immigrants who cannot prove they will have healthcare coverage or the ability to pay for it within 30 days of arriving in the country. See: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/presidential-proclamat ion-suspension-entry-immigrants-will-financially-burden-united-states-healthcare -system/ 4 An individual will be considered a public charge if she is likely to receive assistance such as food stamps, public housing assistance, and Medicaid for longer than 12 out of a 36-month stretch. See Department of Homeland Security v. New York, case 19A785: https://www.supremecourt.gov/search.aspx?filename=/docket/docketfiles/html/public /19a785.html. 5 On its website, USCIS includes these as factors in how determinations will be made. See: https://www.uscis.gov/legal-resources/final-rule-public-charge-ground-inadm issibility 6 When the refugees entered the country, Brazilian law required that they live in the country for six years before qualifying for permanent residency and an additional four years before obtaining citizenship. 7 Providing healthcare was codified into law in the post-dictatorship constitution of 1988. It was considered part of the country’s democratizing process. 8 Estatuto do Idoso/ The Statute on the Elderly passed in 2003 (Law 10.741). It defines the rights of the elderly and the obligations of the state, community, and principally the family to meet their needs. It stipulates “moral or material abandonment on the part of a family” of an elderly relative could be reported to the Public Ministries, and those accused face charges and prosecution. The full text of this federal law can be found here: http://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/leis/2003/l10.741.htm. 9 The refugees received assistance for food and/or materials for their encampment from organized collectivities, such as Instituto Autonomia, Movimento Democracia Direta (MDD), some individual members of Palestinian organizations in Brazil, such as Federação Árabe Palestina (FEPAL), the mosque in Brasília, as well as from independent actors and individuals in the local Arab community. This was how they were able to subsist while UNHCR refused to grant them refugees their assistance checks. 10 For the full text of the law, see: http://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/leis/l9474.htm 11 Other refugees who had been part of the same group from Iraq, would at different moments come to Brasília and join the protests, both when the older refugees were camped out in front of UNHCR in Lago Sul and when they were in Itamaraty. They too had grievances about the resettlement program. 12 Palestinians are considered the most protracted refugee situation in modern history and today constitute over 5 million people registered with the UN agency UNRWA in over 58 refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria.

Migration and the aging body 253 13 “Who is Jair Bolsonaro? Brazil’s far right president in his own words,” The Guardian, October 29, 2018. Accessed January 28, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/world /2018/sep/06/jair-bolsonaro-brazil-tropical-trump-who-hankers-for-days-of-dictator ship 14 Cesar Muñoz and Tamara Boner, “Brazil Grants Asylum to 21,000 Venezuelans in a Single Day,” HRW December 6, 2019. Accessed January 31, 2020. https://www.hrw .org/news/2019/12/06/brazil-grants-asylum-21000-venezuelans-single-day#. 15 “United States Provides Additional Humanitarian Aid to Venezuelans Who Have Fled the Country,” USAID April 10, 2019. Accessed January 30, 2020. https://www.usaid .gov/news-information/press-releases/apr-10-2019-united-states-provides-additionalhumanitarian-aid-venezuelans-who-fled-country 16 According to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), “Congress has exempted certain classes of immigrants from the public charge ground of inadmissibility.” See: https://www.uscis.gov/legal-resources/final-rule-public-charge-groundinadmissibility 17 The termination of TPS is being challenged in court and has therefore been extended for Salvadorans until January 4, 2021. See https://www.uscis.gov/humanitarian/tempo rary-protected-status 18 See: https://www.unhcr.org/ph/figures-at-a-glance

Works cited Abrego, Leisy J. 2014. Sacrificing Families: Navigating Laws, Labor, and Love Across Borders. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Anderson, Benedict. 2006 (1983). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso. Benefício Assistencial ao Idoso e á Pessoa com Deficiência (BPC). Accessed January 13, 2020. http://mds.gov.br/assuntos/assistencia-social/beneficios-assistenciais/bpc Featherstone, Mike and Mike Hepworth. 1991. “The Mask of Ageing and the Postmodern Life Course.” In The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory. Eds. Mike Featherstone, Mike Hepworth and Bryan Turner. London: Sage Publications. Feldman, Ilana. 2008. “Refusing Invisibility: Documentation and Memorialization in Palestinian Refugee Claims.” Journal of Refugee Studies 21(4): 498–516. Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge. New York: Pantheon Books. Holpuch, Amanda. 2019. “Trump Administration Denies Special Help to Venezuelans Seeking Asylum.” The Guardian. May 5. Accessed January 31, 2020: https://www .theguardian.com/world/2019/may/05/venezuela-asylum-seekers-refugees-trump-admi nistration-us Lei 9474/97 e Coletânia de Instrumentos de Proteção Internacional dos Refugiados. 2005. Brasília, DF: UNHCR/ACNUR (A Agência da ONU para os Refugiados). Lei 10.741 Estatuto do Idoso/ The Statute on the Elderly. Londoño, Ernesto. 2019. “Bolsonaro Pulls Brazil from UN Migration Accord.” New York Times. January 9. Accessed September 19, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01 /09/world/americas/bolsonaro-brazil-migration-accord.html Menjívar, Cecilia and Leisy Abrego. 2012. “Legal Violence: Immigration Law and the Lives of Central American Immigrants.” American Journal of Sociology 117(5): 1880–1421. Muñoz, Cesar and Tamara Boner. 2019. “Brazil Grants Asylum to 21,000 Venezuelans in a Single Day.” HRW. December 6. Accessed January 31, 2020. https://www.hrw.org/ news/2019/12/06/brazil-grants-asylum-21000-venezuelans-single-day#.

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Ong, Aihwa. 2006. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham: Duke University Press. Peteet, Julie Marie. 2005. Landscapes of Hope and Despair: Palestinian Refugee Camps. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Ramos-Zayas, Ana Y. 2004. “Delinquent Citizenship, National Performances: Racialization, Surveillance, and the Politics of ‘Worthiness’ in Puerto Rican Chicago.” Latino Studies 2: 26–44. UNHCR: The UN Refugee Agency. 2019. Global Trends on Forced Displacement. Accessed September 18, 2019. https://www.unhcr.org/ph/figures-at-a-glance USAID. 2019. “United States Provides Additional Humanitarian Aid to Venezuelans Who Have Fled the Country.” April 10. Accessed January 30, 2020. https://www.usaid.go v/news-information/press-releases/apr-10-2019-united-states-provides-additionalhumanitarian-aid-venezuelans-who-fled-country U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. 2020. Final Rule on Public Charge Grounds of Inadmissibility. Accessed January 28, 2020. https://www.uscis.gov/legal-resources/ final-rule-public-charge-ground-inadmissibility Wamsley, Laurel, Pam Fessler and Richard Gonzales. 2019. “Federal Judges in 3 States Block Trump’s ‘Public Charge’ Rule for Green Card.” NPR. October 19. Accessed January 28, 2020. https://www.npr.org/2019/10/11/769376154/n-y-judge-blocks-tr ump-administrations-public-charge-rule

Part VI

Global migration/ Mediterranean crossings

19 Caribbean borderlands and traveling theories Imperial frontier, translocal nations, federation of diasporas, planetary archipelago Agustín Laó-Montes This chapter addresses the topic of Border as category, process, and perspective, particularly from the political-epistemic lens of Caribbean critique from two angles:1 first, counterpointing Cuba’s and Puerto Rico’s national formations as translocal diasporic processes; and second, exploring the multiple meanings, interpretive possibilities, and critical values of several categories of Caribbean critical discourse: archipelago, creolization, crossroads, marronage, transculturation, and translocation. In this task, I follow the political-epistemic engagement that Edward Said and María Lugones characterized, from different angles, as Travel Theories. I also incorporate the perspective that Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson called Border as Method, wherein geo-historical categories are crafted to apprehend movement, process, and relationality beyond the confines of the nation-state, against what we call methodological nationalism. This engagement entails a situated cosmopolitanism, where local histories are explicitly linked to larger landscapes of power, knowledge, and culture.2

Long-distance nationalism: Forging Cuban & Puerto Rican nations from the world city Puerto Rican writer Luis Rafael Sánchez, in his celebrated short story La Guagua Aérea (The Airbus), represents Puerto Rican nationality as taking place inbetween two shores of broken dreams, the archipelago of Puerto Rico and Puerto Rican communities in the US. Sánchez’s narrative, which inspired a film with the same title, and many analyses about the multiple locations of Puerto Ricanness, refers to the Puerto Rican condition as constituting a translocal nation, a trans-nation, or nation-on the move (as labeled by Jorge Duany) since the great migration after World War II, when almost half of its population moved to the US imperial territory between 1947 and 1960, representing the first major exodus by air in the world.3 The phenomenon Benedict Anderson calls long-distance nationalism is much older for Puerto Rico and Cuba. The concept of long-distance nationalism refers to the leading role of intellectual-activists in exile for developing nationalist movements and discourses. In this vein, nations are forged to a large extent through

258 Agustín Laó-Montes processes of political organization and intellectual production of active exchange between activists living in metropoles with those in national territories. In this avatar, national formation and anti-colonial nationalisms are partly conceived and configured in translocal spaces in-between metropolitan centers and colonial places. The Cuban Revolutionary Party was founded the year 1892 in New York City, to fight for the independence of Cuba and Puerto Rico, the two remaining colonies of the Spanish Empire in the Americas. Cuban and Puerto Rican flags were designed together in New York with the same red, blue, and white colors inverted between star and lines. Hence, the repeated phrase Cuba and Puerto Rico are two wings of the same bird, a verse from a 19th-century poem by Puerto Rican patriot Lola Rodríguez de Tío. In this tune, Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, the Afro-Puerto Rican who founded what still is the most important archive of the African Diaspora in the world, and Jose Marti, the most prominent ideological leader of the 19th-century Cuban revolution, arguably the sharpest anti-colonial intellectual in the fin-de-siécle invention of Latin America as a world-region, shared membership in the Two Antilles Club of the Cuban Revolutionary Party in New York. Martí and Schomburg also participated in La Liga (The League), a mutual aid community association and political organization of Cubans and Puerto Ricans of African descent who gathered in early 20th-century New York City to advocate for full citizenship for the class of color, and to fight for the joint independence of Cuba and Puerto Rico, for their constitution as sovereign nation-states. In his book Racial Migrations: New York and the Revolutionary Politics of the Spanish Caribbean, Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof tells a story of Cuban and Puerto Rican Blacks such as Rafael Serra, Pachín Marín, Sotero Figueroa, and Manuela Aguayo, all leaders of La Liga, forging political communities building afro-diasporic, anti-colonial nationalist, and labor solidarities, crossing and transgressing imperial, state, capital, and territorial borders. Rafael Serra, a key leader of La Liga, born and raised in Cuba, was prominent in a translocal–transnational network of anarchist and socialist cigar makers, formed within a web of cities that included San Juan, Ponce, New York, Tampa/Ybor City, Havana, Matanzas, and Santo Domingo. The intertwined histories of these two Antillean archipelagos reveals the entanglement of two borderlands or borderscapes – New York City and the Hispanic Antilles – in the hemispheric contact zone of the Americas. The project of the Federation of the Antilles, advanced by the most lucid anti-colonial (in present terms decolonial) voices of the time, such as Puerto Rican Ramón Emeterio Betances and Cuban Jose Martí, demonstrate the combination of national and regional formation, as in the terms patria chica (small motherland) and patria grande (big motherland), that more than a juxtaposition of nation-states, expressed a radical democratic will of regionality and community-making across national borders. The democratic and decolonial nature of the Antillean Federation Project, a 19th-century prime example of critical regionalism, was manifest in its antiracist, anti-imperialist, and radical republican character. (Rama)

Caribbean borderlands and traveling theories 259 Antonio Benítez Rojo’s concept-metaphor of the Caribbean as an island that repeats itself, signifying cosmopolitan geographies that disseminate subjectivities, cultural practices, and genres, social and political movements, beyond insular territorial boundaries, apprehends the joint historical production of Cuban and Puerto Rican anti-colonial nationalisms with political, cultural, and intellectual headquarters in New York. An emerging world city, New York was a polyvalent space of multiple encounters and struggles – of capital and labor, of western and subaltern modernities – a nodal space for communites of activism forging anticolonial nationalisms for two key island-spaces within the zone conceived in US imperial discourse as backyard, unwittingly within the territory of the nascent American empire. The islands repeated themselves in New York, the belly of the beast, as Martí said, paradoxically facilitating important cultural and political exchanges, constituting meaningful historical developments for the Caribbean archipelagos of Cuba and Puerto Rico, born as translocal nations. The translocal as a key category of traveling theory signifies not simply relational fields and spaces of power and culture beyond the local and the nation, but also the intersection of locations (gender, class, sexual, ethnic-racial, generational) which constitute and mediate the self. In this complex matrix, I frame the argument of Cuba and Puerto Rico as translocal nations (Laó Montes “Introduction”).

The Caribbean as contact zone: Transculturation and creolization In this section, the argument will turn into the Caribbean and the Americas as entangled geographies we conceptualize as a contact zone. We owe the theorization of the Americas as contact zone to Mary Louise Pratt, who in her book Imperial Eyes extends the concept of transculturation beyond the nation, to the North–South space of uneven developments and unequal exchanges in the Western Hemisphere. I understand imperial space not simply as formed by geo-political domination and capitalist exploitation, but as a complex process of transculturation where subaltern bodies, ideas, movements, and aesthetics travel in different directions, and influence cultural, intellectual, and political spheres that constitute contested terrains. Transculturation becomes a category that reveals relations, flows, travels, exchanges, and struggles, patterns and contradictions, processes and products, crossing symbolic and material borders of state, capital, and empire. Hence, it is no accident that transculturation and creolization are keywords in Caribbean critique for reconceiving power, geography, subject, and community. The concept of transculturation has a rich history since coined by Fernando Ortiz in his 1940 classic Cuban Counterpoint of Sugar and Tobacco. Bracketing a widespread signification of transculturation as a staple of a discourse of mestizaje, as a melting pot of diverse ethnic-racial sources in a national culture, that for Ortiz was the foundation of cubanía, we rather work within a critical elaboration of the category. In this beat, Jossiana Arroyo argues that transculturation is a complex cultural process implying a power discourse in which two cultures intermingle, such as White Europeans and Black Africans. In her analysis, transculturation

260 Agustín Laó-Montes becomes cultural travestism: a strategy where the integration of the body of the other into the national discourse poses the problems of racial, sexual and gender representation of said body, and the various masks to which the subject has to resort. Here the prefix trans expresses a process of multiple mediations of power (class, ethnic-racial, gender, sexual) that constitutes culture as a contested terrain, and the subject as the active foci of a plurality of relations and struggles, as in the migrant subject of Antonio Cornejo Polar.4 In this key, transculturation is a category of traveling theory and as such a resource of border as method. The concept of transculturation is comparable to creolization, a key category in the Caribbean critical repertoire, and in the African diaspora. The ideas of creole and creolization are age-old, have a long history and a variety of meanings. I am using the concept of creolization in a fashion akin to Martinican writer Edouard Glissant, as a process of containment… [which is] deeply framed in the history of slavery, racial terror and sub-alternate survival in the Caribbean that involves an addition of conflicts, traumas, ruptures and the violence of uprooting. He differentiates it from simple processes of linguistic articulation and from cultural and genetic miscegenation. Glissant bases creolization on the principle of Caribbean pluriversality, and argues that its complexity and fluidity must be researched with an analytics of transversality and a poetics of relationality. This relational and processual method is formulated from a cosmopolitan standpoint of the totality, a world-historical perspective that Glissant conceptualizes with his concept tout monde.5 In this cadence, creolization is unpredictable, produces no synthesis and is a continuous, fluent and contradictory process. This does not imply that creolization means uprooting, a loss of vision, a suspension of the sense of being, because transience is not an errant quest, and diversity is not a dilution. In this key, Glissant argues that ambiguity was the first survival strategy in the silent universe of the plantation, where oral expression, the only possible form of expression for the enslaved, was organized in a discontinuous manner, and discontinuity is struggle, the same rupture turned on by that other deviation we know as marooning, a supreme expression of the ambiguity and discontinuity of the process of creolization. This leads him to conclude that the ambiguity and the fluidity of creolization are not signs of weakness, but unprecedented conceptions of identity. On syncopated tuning with Glissant, Michel Rolph Trouillot argues that creolization is a vital construct to understand and become involved in key processes of creative selection and cultural struggles in the Caribbean and the African diaspora. In counterpoint to Occidentalist binary logics masking relations and processes, while facilitating the – social, cultural, ethnic-racial, gender, sexuality – hierarchies that constitute the modern/colonial power matrix; creolization represents a resource of method in which the archipelago thought that Glissant calls philosophy and poetics of the relationship is being resorted to. Glissant counterpoints archipelago thought (combining diversity and relationality, where the whole does not exist without the specificity and articulation of the parts, as if they were islands) to continental thought, which characterizes the systemic and totalizing logics of the Westernizing imaginary.

Caribbean borderlands and traveling theories 261 I contend that creolization and transculturation are useful categories to conceptualize and investigate power constellations and formation of identities on a decolonial key. Both categories are based on critical visions of imperial/colonial domination and the logics of capital to elaborate analytics of intercultural interaction and identity formation, as complex and contradictory processes that interlink different dimensions of power. They are historical categories created to explain the heterogeneity and fluidity of cultures, memories, identities, and power processes in the Caribbean and have been elaborated and translated beyond the Antillean archipelago. Transculturation – as formulated by Ortiz – is a category useful for analyzing the contradictions and possibilities of the national, elaborated in such a way that it is now valuable to interpret translocal spaces with the strategy of counterpunctual representation that it was conceived with. The concept of creolization was coined from the West Indian historical scenario, in an archipelago logic that is similar to a diasporic perspective which does not privilege the national, placed on a translocal spatial-temporal matrix. From the viewpoint of the archipelago, Glissant affirms that creolization continues to work in our megalopolises, from Mexico City to Miami, from Los Angeles to Caracas, from Sao Paulo to Kingston, from New Orleans to San Juan, where the inferno of cement ghettos are but an extension of the hell of sugar cane or of the cotton fields. (Creolization) Intoning this beat, James Clifford argues “now, we are all West Indians in our urban archipelagos”. The Caribbean, that Federation of African, Asian, Arab, and European diasporas, is a prime space of creolization and transculturation, a heteroglossic, polyphonic, chaotic, and contradictory historical territory; paradise and inferno of oppression practices, contested by an infinity of liberation politics and projects. It is not by accident that both major modern revolutions of the Americas (Haitian and Cuban revolutions) took root in Caribbean circuits, in this quintessentially diasporic crossroads of modernity/coloniality where identity, culture, and power projects are articulated as syncopated polyphonies, through counterpointings that express and generate severe contradictions and complex harmonies.

Unpacking Caribbean regionality In this inquiry the most general question should be what a region is. This problem that occupied anthropology, geography, and historical sociology, had either focused on sub-national micro-regions, or reified macro-regions as if they were conglomerates of juxtaposed nations defined by geo-political, economic, and/ or geo-cultural criteria. I propose the Caribbean should be analyzed as a worldregion historically created as part of the world-historical space called capitalist modernity. As a world-regional space, the Caribbean began to take shape with the

262 Agustín Laó-Montes same process that produced the onto-historical and epistemic invention of Europe, Africa, and the Americas. The Antilles constitute the first colonial region of the Atlantic system and the first sites of colonization by European empires, of the institution of coerced labor subsumed to capitalism (encomienda and plantation slavery), and the making of early modern imperial/colonial and racial discourses. As a world-region, the Caribbean should be interpreted in the longue durée of the modern/colonial capitalist world-system. It’s on-going process of patterning as a world-historical space should be analyzed within this spatio-temporal matrix. There are multiple configurations of space and time in such a process and that’s why we can draw different scales and articulations of regionality. There are distinct types of regions, strategies of regionalization, and cognitive mappings of regional fields and borders. As fields of power and unequal exchange, empires can be defined as regional formations within the world-system. The Atlantic system can be conceptualized as a large historical formation, as a region of the modern/ colonial capitalist world-system. World-regions are geo-historical spaces constituted within the longue durée wherein the world-system is formed as a “concrete ambiguous universal”, a fragmented totality. Capitalist modernity is a complex and evolving historical totality where, as a world-region, the Caribbean is a microcosm of its “structural heterogeneity” and fundamental historicity, its plural worlds and multiple temporalities. In Dale Tomich’s analysis, “the Caribbean appears as a rich, multi-layered, multi-textured sediment of world history – an intricate pattern of diverse spaces, groups, and activities formed within distinct historical temporalities, ultimately unified through the plural spatial and temporal dimensions of the world economy” (79). Trouillot praises Sydney Mintz’s analysis of the region’s “units and boundaries” as “an exemplar of family resemblance a la Wittgenstein” insofar as it “ties the Caribbean to the rest of the world” while it “does not superimpose on its internal units but views Caribbean territories along a multidimensional continuum informed by history. Colonial domination, African substrata, ecological limits, forms of labor extraction, cultural and ideological ambiance, and now U.S. domination intermix in this scheme” (Global Transformations, 7–8). Pursuing a similar logic, I extend the Adornian/Benjaminian concept to argue that the Caribbean can be seen as a constellation, similarly to Glissant’s concept of archipelago. Constellational thinking signifies a tradition in Marxism (Adorno, Balibar, Benjamin, Bloch, Dussel, Fanon, C.L.R. James, Quijano) where the totality and its parts are theorized as fragmented, partial, historically contingent, and mediated. If the ultimate onto-historic and epistemic unit of analysis is the historical totality (i.e., the modern/colonial capitalist world-system), the form and articulation of its constitutive parts are partly determined by the ebb and flow of history and agency. The Caribbean is not only a world-regional historical space within the world-historical processes of capitalist modernity, but also a constellation/ archipelago of political, economic, and cultural projects. Regionalization as a process is not only dependent on imperial power and capitalist development, but is also the product of everyday resistances, social movements, aesthetic practices, and transformative projects. The Caribbean could be

Caribbean borderlands and traveling theories 263 seen as a regional constellation of western domination and subaltern struggles, a crossroads of diasporas, and an imperial borderland. The Caribbean is constantly re-invented and composed in contending ways. Puerto Rican writer Edgardo Rodriguez Julia claims that Antillanismo is a regional contour of Puerto Rican history, culture, and identity, in contrast to the Caribbean that he evaluates as an Anglophone imperial invention. CARICOM defines the Caribbean basin as a primarily Anglophone economic market, while the US imperial state understands it as its geo-political “backyard”. Both are against the grain of C.L.R. James’s regional genealogy, where Caribbean revolutions are of world-historical significance from the early 19th-century Haiti to late 20th-century Cuba, as argued in the epilogue to his Black Jacobins, titled, From Toussaint Louverture to Fidel Castro. A key analytical task in analyzing, mapping, and comparing Caribbean discourses is contrasting contending discourses on the definition, meanings, prospects and projects of the region. Our biggest challenges in developing nuanced analyses of Caribbean regionality are unpacking categories (e.g., slavery, plantation, African), identifying historical processes of continuity and rupture while finding regional threads of identity and difference, and developing decolonial rationalities grounded on historical experience and vernacular cultures.

Caribbean as imperial frontier, planetary borderland, worldly crossroads In 1969 two histories of the Caribbean were published with the same title, From Columbus to Castro, one authored by Eric Williams and the other by Juan Bosch, both intellectuals and heads of state, the former of Trinidad-Tobago and the latter of the Dominican Republic. The subtitle of Bosch’s book, the Caribbean Imperial Frontier, can serve as basis for conceptualizing it as a prime space of inter-imperial formations, where all European empires and the American empire, develop technologies of imperial statecraft and forms of competition, strategies of labor exploitation and capital accumulation, cultural and epistemic imperialism, since the long 16th century until today. Instead of imperial border, I translate it as imperial frontier, following the distinction made by Mezzadra and Neilson, who argue that while border conventionally signifies relatively fixed demarcating lines, frontiers evident from the narrative around which one of the foundation myths of U.S. identity is constructed, is by definition a space open to expansion, a mobile ‘‘front’’ in continuous formation, pointing to the constitutive role of the colonial frontier. From this perspective, the Caribbean represents the first site of colonial modernity, constitutive of western capitalist modernity, primary referent for primitive accumulation, chattel slavery, conquest and colonization, and to the process of defining a great Atlantic frontier between the so-called old and new worlds. In that key, we theorize Caribbean archipelagos as borderlands, following Gloria Anzaldúa’s understanding of borderlands as being and living at crossroads, interlocking borders that are at once physical and symbolic, simultaneously social, ethnic-racial, gender and sexual. In tune with Mezzadra’s and Neilson’s

264 Agustín Laó-Montes adoption of Perera’s notion of borderscapes as a ‘‘shifting and conflictual’’ zone in which ‘‘different temporalities and overlapping emplacements as well as emergent spatial organizations’’ take shape, (while) the simultaneous expansion and contraction of political spaces (are framed by) the ‘‘multiple resistances, challenges, & counterclaims’’ to which they give rise to (Mezzadra and Neilson 10). Caribbean borderlands are crossroads of western and subaltern modernities, their diverse yet intertwined geo-historical landscapes are contested terrains between imperial and decolonial practices and projects. The great Caribbean, a translocal geography that articulates the Antilles with the continental basin in Central and South America, as well as to spaces where the island repeats itself in world cities such as New York, Paris, London, Miami, and Toronto; constitutes a federation of diasporas and a planetary archipelago. Stuart Hall contends that the Caribbean is the first Diaspora, a diasporic space par excellance, shaped by historical processes of violent dispersions and dislocations such as conquest, slavery, revolutions, and migrations.6 This diasporic condition implies challenging monolithic views of the nation, and analyzing Caribbean identities as fluid, plural, and relational, as such formed and transformed through processes of transculturation and creolization. As Hall, we see diasporas not as citizens outside of the territory of the nationstate, but as translocal formations of peoplehood, dispersed yet connected, who could develop common identifications within their diversity, as expressed in Paul Gilroy’s category of the changing same. A key historical example is the African diaspora, a principal constituent of the Caribbean region. In fact, the very category of Africa is a product of modern/colonial bordering of the world as divided into continents, the same process where Africana subjects where disseminated primarily within the Atlantic system, constituting a diasporic formation, conceived in slavery and its afterlives in racial/patriarchal capitalism, and through the houses that race built through Black struggles, movements, and counterpublics. The African diaspora as translocal space, as a transnational field of aesthetic creation, cultural production, social and political movements, and ethnic-racial identification, is grounded in what WEB DuBois conceptualized as double consciousness, an uneasy sense of belonging to the nation, accompanied by affinities and identification with a larger landscape of African and Black histories, cultures, and politics. The Caribbean also has a protagonist role in the production and refashioning of the African Diaspora by Black historical agency, providing world leadership from Pan-Africanism in the late 19th century to the current campaign for historical reparations from the multiple injuries (economic, political, symbolic, psychological) caused by the institution of slavery and its aftermath. However, as Hall himself argues, the Caribbean is much more than African, it is indeed, a world crossroads where African, Arab, East Asian, and South Asian Diasporas intermingle with Amerindians and Europeans. Continuous crossing of multiple borders is characteristic of Caribbean quotidian cultural, political, and epistemic praxis. Intoning this tune, we define the Caribbean as Federation of Diasporas and as a world crossroads. More than mere

Caribbean borderlands and traveling theories 265 figure or trope, crossroads operate here as concept-metaphor, a category to theorize a geo-historical space that is a kind of microcosm of global encounters, imperial competition, capitalist development, and antisystemic struggles. In African cosmologies, crossroads, as places of multiple crossings, are privileged spaces for understanding the possibilities of being (ontology), as well as the varieties of analysis (epistemology). In Yoruba tradition, Exu-Eleggua, Orisha, or deity of the crossroads, opens and closes pathways of life, while presiding over interpretation as Hermes in the Greek Pantheon. In this beat, as world crossroads, Caribbean borderlands are the kingdom of Exu-Eleggua.7 In key, Wilson Harris, in his essay Creoleness: The Crossroads of Civilization, identifies Legba as the deity of creolization in Haitian Vodou, who reveals an insecurity in the pantheon of gods around the world that run counter to secure ideologies or dogmas in which immortality is described as the grain and blood of hierarchical privilege. Here, Legba signifies a culture of resistance, a decolonial praxis embedded in a creolized Afroamerican spirituality that Harris identifies with Marronage – another key category in Caribbean critique. In his Freedom as Marronage, Neil Roberts contends that marrons inhabit a liminal space between slavery and freedom, constantly crossing, transgressing, and negotiating such borders, thus revealing the relative and contested nature of freedom. Roberts articulates a long tradition in Caribbean critique, where marronage is a political-epistemic perspective, of living inside & outside of dominant regimes of knowledge and power, forging fugitive zones, vernacular polities and epistemes, guarding from the dangers of capital and empire, while engaging them. This is the sense in which Frederick Douglas and WEB DuBois characterized the nascent state of Haiti in the 19th century as a Black marron nation (Hooker). Marronage constitutes a liminal space in-between that as such operates through a logic of creolization. In this vein, creolization signifies a praxis of relationality between multiple bodies, cultures, identities, communities, knowledges, economies, that serves as a historical foundation and as a method of production of critical knowledge as argued by Jane Gordon, Paget Henry, and Neil Roberts. For the most, Caribbean discourse, devices its politics and poetics, its theory and critical strategies with the gaze that Fernand Braudel terms as the perspective of the world. Playing this drum, Glissant crafts the standpoint of the totality with his philosophy and poetics of relation, with a worldly vision that he calls the tout monde, literally all the world, also using the creole tout moun which means everybody, pursuing a logic of archipelago thinking, namely understanding the planet as an archipelago of islands who has their own ontological dimension at the same time that they exist in relation to each other. He relates archipelago as epistemic mode and method, to Deleuze’s concepts of assemblage and rhizome, as key categories for a relational ontology of process and difference, where the totality is defined by plural articulations of parts which have relative autonomy as well as their own temporalities and spatialities. In this beat, bodies, territories, continents, oceans, subjects, peoples, polities, currents, and movements are conceptualized as archipelagos, islands entangled within larger landscapes of agency, power, history, and geography. In this key, Glissant understands what is called

266 Agustín Laó-Montes globalization: a process in which the whole world is archipelogizing and creolizing, where what I call creolization (is) the meeting, the interference, the schock, the harmonies & disharmonies between cultures, in the realized totality of the world-earth. Here, there is a sort of Caribbeanization of the world, understood as a planetary archipelago. In this beat, global cities are key spaces for the multiples crossings we call liquid borders, a kind of world crossroads. As we demonstrated at the beginning of this article, this is not a new phenomenon as claimed by most of the globalization literature, given that New York was a world city where Cuban and Puerto Rican nationalisms where forged in the late 19th century. I end this chapter highlighting three political dimensions of this strand of Caribbean critique. The first refers to the politics of knowledge. Together, these constructs and concept-metaphors constitute what Fernando Coronil defined as non-imperial geo-historical categories, against and beyond Occidentalist mappings of time and space. Coronil argues that Occidentalism, rather than the counterpart of Orientalism, is its condition of possibility, and offers the following definition: by the term Occidentalism I allude to the sum of representational practices that take part in the production of conceptions of the world, which 1. separate the components of the world in isolated units; 2. de-link histories that relate to one another; 3. transform the difference into a hierarchy; 4. naturalize said representations, and therefore 5.intervene, albeit inadvertently, in the reproduction of existing asymmetric power relations. I contend that the repertoire of categories of Caribbean critique we presented here constitute a fundamental endowment for a post-occidentalist non-imperial traveling theory. In this key, we advocate for epistemologies of the south as well as for creolizing theory by crossing political-epistemic borders as in Jane Gordon’s readings of Rousseau through Fanon thus exercising a sort of double critique. According to Cesaire and Fanon, this implies the end of the age of Europe along with an inter-culturalization of critical theory and the politics of liberation by means of transcultural dialogues to make them truly worldly. The second political dimension of this discussion is what we can define as the question of subjectivity and agency. In this register, we posit a transmigrant subject, who is plural, inhabits at once a variety of spaces and scales, and tends to simultaneously dwell in travel. This trans self could be a diasporic subject, the figure of the refugee, as well as the translocal wretched of the earth of Fanon. To conceive her as a subject-agent of liberation, entails to engage in what Jacqui Alexander term pedagogies of crossing across an array of differences (sexual, ethnic-racial, class, geo-political, gender, generation, etc.), and to enact in praxis and critique what Claudia de Lima Costa and Sonia Álvarez call translocal feminist translations, a methodology of dialogue through difference to build complex unity (as in María Lugones) for constructing political community. In this feminist beat, I postulate an intersectional politics of translocation, that combines the multiple mediations of power that constitute the sources of the self, with the diversity of scales (from local to global) that configure the Tout Monde as a translocal space. The third and last point corresponds to Mezzadra’s and Neilson’s argument for border as method as a means for constructing a politics of the commons. Here

Caribbean borderlands and traveling theories 267 a crucial quest is how to create common grounds in light of the proliferation of differences. How to forge complex unity within a highly fragmented world? The historical making of collective identity through processes of creolization and transculturation, as explained above, compels us to analyze cultural and political identities as contested and changing, as constituted through struggles and the play of differences, without denying their ontology as key sources of self and community. In this tune, the standpoint of the totality in this lineage of Caribbean critique does not collapse into a postmodern denial of universals, it rather entails a situated universalism and a subaltern cosmopolitanism. In the critical discourse of Sylvia Wynter, this means moving from the exclusionary politics of Man, that she characterizes as the coloniality of power, knowledge, being, and citizenship, to a decolonizing radical democratic politics of the Human. Playing this drum, a robust decolonial politics of liberation necessarily entails a continuous process of crossing borders (gender, sexual, ethnic, racial, cultural, class, geographic, ecological, epistemic) through practices of transculturation and creolization. In this key, we present the following phrase as political blueprints: Dismantling the Multiple Chains of Coloniality and Oppression, Building Rainbows of Solidarity for Liberation.

Notes 1 For two different understandings of Caribbean critique, see Henry, Nesbitt, TorresSaillant. 2 On this topic, see Said, Lugones, Mezzadra and Neilson. 3 See Duany, Flores, Lao-Montes (“Islands at the Crossroads”), and Sanchez. 4 On this topic, see Cornejo Polar, and Moraña. 5 See Glissant: Tout-Monde, Poetics of Relation, and Traité du Tout-Monde. 6 On this topic, see Hall, both “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” and The Fateful Triangle. 7 See Gates and y Lao-Montes (Contrapunteos).

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor. Philosophical Elements of a Theory of Society. New York: Polity Press, 2019. Alexander, M. Jacqui. Pedagogies of Crossing. Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Álvarez, Sonia and Claudia de Lima Costa et al., Ed. Translocalities/Translocalidades: Feminist Politics of Translation in the Latin/a Americas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Anderson, Benedict. The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, South Asia, and the World. London: Verso, 1998. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderland-La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987. Arroyo, Jossianna. Travestismos culturales: literatura y etnografía en Cuba y Brasil. Pittsburgh: Universidad de Pittsburgh-Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2003.

268 Agustín Laó-Montes Balibar, Etienne. On Universals: Constructing and Deconstructing Community. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. Benítez-Rojo, Antonio. La isla que se repite: El Caribe y la Perspectiva Posmoderna. Hanover, NH: Ediciones del Norte, 1989. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Boston: Mariner Books, 2019. Bloch, Ernst. El principio de la esperanza. Madrid: Aguilar, 1977. Bloch, Ernst. The Spirit of Utopia. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2000. Bosch, Juan. De Cristobal Colon a Fidel Castro: el Caribe Frontera Imperial. Miguel Angel Porrúa, Mexico: Miguel Angel Porrúa, Editor, 2009. Clifford, James. “Diasporas.” Routes. Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. 244–278. Cornejo Polar, Antonio. “Una heterogeneidad no dialéctica: sujeto y discurso migrantes en el Perú moderno.” Revista Iberoamericana, LXII, 176/177 (1996): 837–844. Coronil, Fernando. The Fernando Coronil Reader. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. Duany, Jorge. The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move: Identities on the Island and the United States. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folks. London: Penguin Books, 1989. Dussel, Enrique. Método para una filosofía de la liberación: superación analéctica de la dialéctica hegeliana. Salamanca: Editorial Sígueme, 1974. Dussel, Enrique. The Underside of Modernity. Nueva Jersey: Humanities Press, 1996. Dussel, Enrique. Política de la liberación. Historia mundial y crítica. Mexico: Trotta, 2007. Fanon, Frantz. Les Damnés de la Terre. Paris-Montreal: Kiyikaat Editions, 2016. Flores, Juan. From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Gates, Henry Louise. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Double Consciousness and Modernity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. Glissant, Édouard. Tout-Monde. Paris: Gallimard, 1993. Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Press, 1997. Glissant, Édouard. Traité du Tout-Monde. Poétique IV. Paris: Gallimard, 1997 Glissant, Édouard. “Creolization in the Making of the Americas.” Caribbean Quarterly, 54, 1–2 (2008): 81–89. Glissant, Édouard. Philosophie de la Relation. Poésie en étendue. Paris: Gallimard, 2009. Glissant, Édouard. El discurso antillano. La Habana: Casa de las Américas, 2013. Gordon, Jane. Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Fanon. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory. Williams y Chrisman, Eds. London: Harvester, 1993. 392–403. Hall, Stuart. The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation. (The W.E.B. DuBois Lectures). Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017. Harris, Wilson. “Creoleness: The Crossroads of Civilization.” Caribbean Creolization: Reflections on the Cultural Dynamics of Language, Literature, and Identity. Kathleen M. Balutansky and Marie-Agnes Sourieau, Eds. Miami: University Press of Florida, 1998. 23–35. Henry, Paget. Caliban’s Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy. London: Routledge, 2000.

Caribbean borderlands and traveling theories 269 Hoffnung-Garskof, Jesse. Racial Migrations: New York City and the Revolutionary Politics of the Spanish Caribbean. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. Hooker, Juliet. Theorizing Race in the Americas. Douglass, Sarmiento, DuBois, and Vasconcelos. Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 2019. James, C.L.R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Overture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Vintage, 1989. Laó-Montes, Agustín. “Islands at the Crossroads: Puerto Rican-ess Traveling between the Translocal Nation and the Global City.” Puerto Rican Jam: Rethinking Colonialism and Nationalism. Frances Negro-Muntaner et al, Eds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. 169–188. Laó-Montes, Agustín. “Introduction: Mambo Montage the Latinization of New York City.” Mambo Montage: The Latinization of New York. Agustín Laó-Montes and Arlene Dávila, Eds. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. 1–53. Laó-Montes, Agustín. Contrapunteos Diaspóricos. Cartografías Políticas de Nuestra Afroamérica. Bogotá: Universidad del Externado, 2020. Lugones, María. Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes. Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. Mezzadra, Sandro and Brett Neilson. Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. Moraña, Mabel. “Antonio Cornejo Polar y los debates actuales del latinoamericanismo.” Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, XXV, 50 (1999): 19–27. Nesbitt, Nick. Caribbean Critique: Antillean Critical Theory from Toussaint to Glissant. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018. Ortiz, Fernando. Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y del azúcar. La Habana: Editorial José Montero, 1940. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge, 2007. Quijano, Aníbal. “Colonialidad y modernidad/racionalidad”. Perú Indígena, 13 (1992): 11–20. Quijano, Aníbal. Modernidad, identidad y utopía en América Latina. Lima: Sociedad y Política Ediciones, 1998. Quijano, Aníbal. “Colonialidad del poder y clasificación social”. Journal of World Systems Research, vi, 2 (2000): 342–386. Rama, Carlos. La Independencia de las Antillas y Ramón Emeterio Betances. San Juan, PR: Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, 1980. Roberts, Neil. Freedom as Maroonage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Rodríguez Julia, Edgardo. Caribeños. San Juan, PR: Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, 2004. Said, Edward. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Sánchez, Luis Rafael. La Guagua Aérea. Un Drama para Reír, una Comedia para Pensar. San Juan, PR: Corporación Producciones Culturales, 1993. Tomich, Dale. “Spaces of Slavery. Times of Freedom, Rethinking Caribbean History in World Perspective”. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 17, 1 (1997): 67–80. Torres-Saillant, Silvio. An Intellectual History of the Caribbean. New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2006. Trouillot, Michel Rolph. “Culture on the Edges: Caribbean Creolization in Historical Context”. From the Margins: Historical Anthropology and its Futures. Brian Keith Axel, Ed. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. 189–210.

270 Agustín Laó-Montes Trouillot, Michel Rolph. Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. New York: Palgrave-McMillan, 2004. Williams, Eric. From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean 1492–1969. New York: Vintage, 1984. Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Toward the Human, After Man, Its Overepresentation -An Argument.” The New Centennial Review, 3, 3 (2003): 257–337.

20 Europe Otherwise Lessons from the Caribbean1 Manuela Boatcă

Social theory has long operated with unmarked categories extrapolated from a sanitized version of European history that ignores both the experience of the East and the South of Europe and the West’s colonial and imperial history (Todorova, Chakrabarty, Dainotto). In most sociological accounts, the “Europe” that hailed as a standard of civilization, modernity, development, capitalism, or human rights was poorly or not at all defined and rarely broken down into any subsets. At the same time, this unspecified entity was overwhelmingly presented as an autonomous, institutionally self-sustaining, and, at least since industrialization, an economically and politically self-contained region. As such, “Europe” was supposed to be always a step ahead of the “non-European” regions to which it was being compared, but unrelated to, and essentially unlike them (Boatcă, “Inequalities Unbound”). In turn, this chapter makes a case for Europe as a creolized space, or Europe Otherwise. I argue that, in order to account for both the transregional entanglements and the internal hierarchies that European colonialism and imperialism have produced since the 16th century, we need to unlearn received notions of Europe as an unmarked category; and that theoretical as well as empirical lessons from the Caribbean are central to relearning Europe differently. Drawing on Caribbean perspectives on creolization, I discuss how creolizing Europe contributes to countering the definition power of ahistorical and unmarked categories. Subsequently, I propose to rethink Europe as a political, cultural, economic, and discursive formation from its current colonial borders in South America and the Caribbean Sea. Finally, I argue that focusing on Europe’s colonial possessions in the Caribbean today and their geographical referent, Caribbean Europe, is one way to effectively creolize established understandings of Europe’s colonial history as a thing of the past, of a white Western European identity as the norm, and of the European Union as confined to continental Europe. Recent crises in the Caribbean – from the 2017 hurricanes to Brexit – provide the magnifying lenses used in the last section to make Europe’s ongoing colonial entanglements theoretically and politically visible.

From coherent Europe to creolized Europe Social science gradually elided processes linked to non-Western European locations from its accounts of capitalist modernity – from the particular historical

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circumstances of the European colonial expansion in the Americas through the colonial and imperial conquest of the non-European world and up to the impact of enslaved plantation labor upon the development of Western societies (Wallerstein et al., Randeria, Patel). Social scientific theory and research grounded in the epistemological premises of the Western European context thus systematically produced a sanitized version of modern “Europe” from which not only colonial violence, genocide, and plunder were missing, but also the experiences of the “majority world” (Connell) – the millions of people that had been forcibly exploited or moved across continents for centuries to the benefit of Western European institutions like the Catholic Church, corporations such as the British or the Dutch East India Company, or all of the European states vying for territorial control overseas. Equally missing from this prevailing notion of Europe was the voluntary emigration of up to 50 million Europeans to the Americas between the 1840s and 1930s (Therborn: 40; Trouillot, Global Transformations 31). As Marx and Engels identified class struggle as the primary conflict of European, modern bourgeois society, and proletarization (Marx/Engels 1848), emigration to the European colonies in the Americas provided a poverty outlet of 12 percent of the continent’s population. Large-scale emigration and decreasing ethnic heterogeneity in Europe by the 1950s, through nation-building, expulsions, and waves of ethnic cleansing, ensured that processes of collective organization and social stratification were theorized in terms of class interests and class conflict, rather than ethnic or racial allegiance (Boatcă “Inequalities Unbound”, Global Inequalities). Unmarked Europe was thus increasingly produced as a coherent entity. Sociology and political science textbooks presented the emergence of sovereign nation-states in Europe following the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia as marking the gradual overcoming of multinational political organizations and multiethnic empires and the start of processes of ethnic homogenization in most of Europe (Therborn). In turn, transnational flows of people, goods, and capital appeared as a relatively new trend of the late twentieth century, and the growing influx of immigrants into Europe as an unprecedented effect of equally recent transnational processes on a once homogeneous European context (Berger and Weiß; Pries). Instead, the Caribbean emerged out of the same intellectual division of labor as “an oddity in Western scholarship” (Trouillot 20), a permanent question mark on the dichotomies created by relegating the modern and the non-modern to different disciplines. The region was shaped by the genocide of the Caribbean’s indigenous peoples in the early sixteenth century, the demographic upheaval caused by the arrival of up to 6 million enslaved Africans during the European transatlantic trade, and the influx of indentured Asian laborers after the abolition of slavery. With a predominantly nonwhite and immigrant population, the Caribbean was neither “native” enough for anthropology, nor “Western” enough for sociology (Trouillot “The Caribbean Region” 20, Glick Schiller 22). As Trouillot signaled, slavery in the Caribbean ended around the same time that the social sciences emerged in Europe and the United States – yet, by then, the Caribbean had already become Europe’s Other. It stood for the backwardness, inefficiency, and unfreedom associated with slavery – the opposite of the modern, efficient, free

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industrial labor viewed as having originated in and characterizing Europe (Boatcă Inequalities Unbound). Tellingly, it was slavery as an institution of global capitalist modernity and its manifold consequences that prompted scholars to question the stark contrast that pitted modern Europe against the non-modern Caribbean. From the 1980s onward, creolization as a relation of entanglement, the outcome of the mass movement of people and goods from Europe and Africa to the Americas and the new languages, cultures and peoples created in the plantation economies became the central reference in literary, historical, sociological, and anthropological analyses of the Caribbean (Glissant, Mintz, Hall). Creolization has been increasingly explored in recent decades as a vital epistemic resource for a sociology of Europe (Gutiérrez Rodríguez, Migration 162ff., Boatcă, Inequalities Unbound, Gutiérrez Rodríguez and Tate). Rather than pitting a culturally, racially, or religiously coherent Europe against a multicultural, multiracial, and religiously syncretic Caribbean, this perspective rethinks Europe as a creolized space by virtue of its very colonial entanglements with regions such as the Caribbean, in the creolization of which it itself played an essential role. It thus substitutes the macrosociological comparison of distinct world regions with a relational methodology that foregrounds the structural links and the long history of power relations between regions. Creolizing Europe is however not only related to Europe’s colonial past, but also to its (post)colonial and (post)imperial present and the ensuing migratory and diasporic movements. The project of creolization would be incomplete if it restricted itself to Europe as an object of study or point of reference of the social sciences. As the only legitimate location and subject of knowledge production about itself and about non-European regions, the unmarked category of Europe has generated theory cleansed of the historical context of colonialism, enslavement, and transcontinental migration. As a way of thinking through and with invisibilized, peripheral formations, or thinking from coloniality, the creolization of theory reverses the direction of theory-building by proceeding “from the bottom up and from the inside out” (Lionnet/Shih 21). Creolizing theory thus becomes a tool for decolonizing social science by starting from the subject position of most sociology – unmarked Europe (Gutiérrez Rodríguez et al. Decolonizing European Sociology) and rethinking it from the geopolitical realities and the lived experiences of the Caribbean.

European borders otherwise The notion that Europe is ultimately coherent in its main features was until recently most apparent in the project of the European Union. The political, economic, and media discourse on the European Union helped promote the unmarked category of Europe discussed above. It narrowed it down to refer only to EU member states, gradually reduced Europeanness to European Union citizenship, and made the whiteness of Europe’s Easterners and Southerners increasingly questionable. As a result, the EU discourse has been slowly monopolizing the label of “Europe” such

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that only its current 28 member states are considered “European” and included in the term. Putting this politics of difference in perspective requires the creolization of the notion of Europe implicit in the European Union discourse through the lens of another minor formation: Europe’s current colonial territories overseas. Represented on every official EU map, they appear both physically disconnected from continental Europe and historically unrelated to its past or present construction of difference. While obviously part of the picture, the Azores, Madeira, the Canary Islands, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Réunion, and French Guiana are not part of the discourse. Their location in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, the Caribbean, and South America is never addressed and does not seem to contradict their Europeanness. The very opposite goes for Turkey, whose “semi-Asian” location, linked to an alleged distance from “European values” (a mainstay of EU discourse) has repeatedly been part of the arguments of denying it EU membership. Today, the EU includes 34 overseas “entities” resulting from the colonial involvement of 6 EU member states: Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Of these, 9 are part of France, Portugal, and Spain and are full-fledged EU members; they are considered “outermost regions” of the European Union and subject to EU legislation (European Parliament 2016). Portugal’s “autonomous regions” Azores and Madeira, Spain’s “autonomous community” of the Canary Islands and the French overseas departments all use Euro as their official currency and are represented on Euro banknotes, which the European Central Bank claims “show a geographical representation of Europe” (European Central Bank 2019). Against this background, the discursive construction of a singular notion of Europe depends on silencing the historical role its member states played in creating the main structures of global political and economic inequality during European colonial rule. The member states of the European Union before the 2004 “Eastern enlargement” were, as Böröcz and Sarkar (162) have argued, “the same states that had exercised imperial rule over nearly half of the inhabitable surface of the globe outside Europe”. Their colonial possessions covered almost half of the inhabited surface of the non-European world. The remaining 25 Overseas Countries and Territories (OCTs), awkwardly described in official language as “countries that have a special relationship to one of the Member States of the European Community” (EEAS 2016), are colonies of Denmark, France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom; they are not part of the single market, yet their nationals are EU citizens – with restricted rights. The 34 colonial possessions under the direct control of EU member states today represent more than half of the 58 remaining colonies worldwide (Dependencies and Territories of the World 2016). This is not a coincidence. The overseas empires of today’s EU states such as Britain, the Netherlands, France, and Belgium had been many times larger than the current size of their territories. The loss of colonial empires after World War II significantly fueled the political impetus behind the creation of the European Economic Community, the EU’s predecessor, to which the contribution of remaining colonies was considered decisive (Muller,

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Figure 20.1 EU’s colonies on Euro banknotes.

Hansen/Jonsson). Upon its founding in 1957, the European Economic Community included not just Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany, but also most of their colonial possessions, officially labeled “overseas countries and territories”, the same category used today for the remaining colonies. They included Belgian Congo and French West and Equatorial Africa, whereas Algeria, at the time part of metropolitan France, was formally integrated into the European Economic Community yet excluded from certain provisions of the Treaty (Hansen/Jonsson 7). Official EU discourse today foregrounds continental Europe to the detriment of all other territories belonging to European states, but geographically located in other continents. In the process, it links Europeanness to a narrowly defined

Figure 20.2 Map of EU overseas countries and territories and outermost regions 2015. Source: Wikimedia commons, public domain, available at: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:EU_OCT_and_OMR_map_en.png.

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physical location which excludes both the past and the present of Europe’s colonial ties to other regions. It is however the minor formation of forgotten Europe that best exemplifies the lack of definition power and the massive silencing of Europe’s colonial entanglements resulting from ongoing coloniality. In a hierarchy of “multiple and unequal Europes”, the EU’s overseas territories appear as “forgotten Europe” – they are literally “off the chart” in terms of Europe’s self-representation and modernity’s checklist, yet “on the map” in terms of the claims laid to them by continental European states. There is no geographic referent for forgotten Europe. True, Europe’s overseas countries, territories, and outermost regions are spread out across the Atlantic Ocean, the Caribbean Sea, and the Pacific and Indian Oceans and thus not easily pinpointed to any one location. Yet the lack of a referent for what ultimately are colonial outposts is a result of what I would like to call the coloniality of memory and that I view as a necessary element of the coloniality of power in the capitalist world-economy. The coloniality of memory is the discursive mechanism ensuring the systematic omission of enduring colonial ties from public discourse on Europe alongside the systematic avoidance of any overarching classification of current colonial territories as regions of Europe2. As such, the coloniality of memory prevents any overarching category from gaining legitimacy as European; references that occasionally or more systematically feature in public discourse tend to be linked to the imperial history of individual states, as labels such as the “Dutch Caribbean”, the “French Antilles”, or the “British West Indies” show. Yet the integral part that colonial possessions have played in the consolidation of European economic and geopolitical power as a whole or the present-day continuities in Western Europe’s entanglement with and policies toward them are never addressed. As an overarching category, “forgotten Europe” therefore helps stress the fact that some of the multiple Europes are more unthinkable than others: Epigonal “Eastern” Europe is white but not quite, Christian but not Western Christian (partly not Christian at all). Its geographical location in Europe is unquestioned, although its EU accession was piecemeal and remains incomplete. The modernity of individual Eastern European states has repeatedly been tied to their EU membership status and seen as a gradual process of “Europeanization”. In turn, in the case of the Caribbean territories of current EU members, it is the African and Asian heritage of their populations and their predominantly syncretic religions that, together with their remote geographical location, decisively unsettle Europe’s prevailing self-definition as continental, white, and Christian.

Thinking otherwise: Caribbean Europe Within forgotten Europe, the Caribbean colonies thus offer both a prime vantage point for upending the dominant understanding and representation of Europe and a concrete basis for a coherent geographic referent of this hitherto unthinkable category. The fact that more than a third of the European Union’s

Figure 20.3 Map of the Caribbean with its European and U.S.-American colonial possessions. Source: CIA World Factbook, Regional Maps, public domain (not visible: French Guiana in South America, see below).

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colonial possessions are located in the Caribbean today warrants an engagement with “Caribbean Europe” – the integral but invisibilized part of an otherwise highly visible, hegemonic Europe. I view Caribbean Europe as encompassing all Caribbean territories previously colonized by a European power and presently administered as dependencies of an EU member, the formal colonial relation to which still figures in the euphemism of their current official denomination – from “territory” to “municipality”, “community”, or “department” of a European state. Accordingly, Caribbean Europe currently includes the French overseas departments of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana, and the French overseas community of St. Martin from among the EU’s “outermost regions”; and the French St. Barthélemy, the British Virgin Islands, Anguilla, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Montserrat, and Turks and Caicos, as well as the Dutch Aruba, Curaçao, Sint Marteen, Bonaire, Saba and Sint Eustatius from among the EU’s “overseas countries and territories” (see Figure 20.3). While the coloniality of power also ties formally independent Caribbean territories to Europe through racialized hierarchies and economic dependence, the notion of Caribbean Europe alerts us to the fact that “classic” administrative colonial ties are still in force today and belies the assumption that formal decolonization has ended. The Caribbean has had the longest and the most complex history of entanglement with Europe. It was the first region in the Americas to be claimed by European powers as early as 1492 and one that received up to 50 percent of the 12.5 million Africans trafficked in the European slave trade from the 16th to the 19th centuries. It has also been the site of several strategic EU projects until today: As the coloniality of memory systematically produces these territories as absent from and unthinkable within the European discourse, it repeatedly taps into their potential to act as Europe’s military and naval bases, sites of medical experiments, spaceports, and tax havens, as well as laboratories of neoliberal economics or warfare (Hansen/Jonsson 2; Bonilla 184f.). Creolizing Europe as creolizing theory – implications and illustrations The notion of Caribbean Europe advanced here is not intended to claim overseas countries and territories for Europe in a renewed, theoretically and epistemically colonial gesture. Rather, it is meant to creolize the very notion of Europe by pointing to the decisive shifts that colonial possessions operate in Europe’s historical legacies and present borders when colonial possessions are consistently taken into account. It is also meant to contribute to the creolization of social theory by reinscribing the experiences of regions othered as non-European, non-Western, and nonwhite such as the Caribbean into a sociology of Europe.

Borders otherwise One of the most immediate effects of rethinking Europe through the Caribbean is a drastic redrawing of EU borders. Most historical and present-day debates on the

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boundaries of Europe have revolved around its Eastern borders; with the rising number of refugees from Africa and the Middle East in recent years, the EU’s Southern border has been increasingly addressed, policed, and militarized. In turn, the EU’s Western boundary has never been questioned in official discourse or constituted the object of accession negotiations. Yet the first shift that occurs when considering Caribbean Europe, an integral part of the European Union, is a radical shift of the EU’s Western border from the Western fringe of the European landmass to French Guiana in South America and Guadeloupe in the Caribbean. As overseas regions of France, the latter are integral parts of the French Republic and consequently of the European Union. The shift also affects the external borders of the EU more generally: Through French Guiana, France borders Brazil and Suriname. Through the Lesser Antilles, which include the US Virgin Islands, the Netherlands shares a maritime border with Venezuela and the United States (see Figure 20.4). The first direct result of drawing EU Europe’s Western border otherwise is an undeniable entanglement with South America, which includes France’s longest land border – with Brazil. Accounting for Caribbean Europe also impacts the EU’s internal borders. Since the territories of EU member states in the Caribbean are differently positioned than on the European landmass, France only borders the Netherlands in the Caribbean – on the island of St. Martin/Sint Marteen. The Netherlands also shares maritime borders with France and the United Kingdom in the Caribbean Sea. From an official EU position, the above are uncontested formal borders. Yet public discourse on the EU, Europeanness, and Europeanization could not be made coherent if it included the fact that the westernmost point of the European Union lies in the Caribbean or that France borders Brazil. This only goes to show the extent to which the coloniality of memory is ingrained in the public perception of Europe. EU Europe’s Caribbean and South American borders only surface in official discourse in times of crisis, or when they can sway political results in the metropole: French presidential candidates all campaigned in the Caribbean territories in the 2017 presidential elections, which earned Emmanuel Macron a significant share of the votes in an otherwise tight race (Le Monde 2017); the United Kingdom was being unanimously accused of colonialism by Gibraltar, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, and the Cayman Islands in 2018 when it attempted to legislate for its Overseas Territories on the issue of disclosing information on business owners (Bernews); while widespread destruction in large parts of the non-independent Caribbean in the wake of hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017 prompted heated debates on the rights of small island territories with high GNI per capita to receive official development aid (The Guardian 2017). The notion of Caribbean Europe puts the function of such crises into sharp relief: They act as magnifying glasses of Europe’s ongoing colonial entanglements. The devastation wrought by the 2017 hurricanes in the Caribbean and the slow response of the British, French, and Dutch governments triggered international debates about the European responsibility in providing disaster relief, prominent calls for Britain to “care for all its citizens” (The Telegraph 2017) and featured the British Caribbean

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Figure 20.4 Anguilla’s European borders. Source: Hanhil/Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

territories as “expensive legacy of empire” in The Times (2017). It also laid the basis for adjusting OECD rules for emergency aid to small island territories. The history and present-day reality of Caribbean Europe also impact the conventional understanding of Europe as a coherent continent and the modern political norm of a united state territory. If French, Spanish, and Portuguese national territory spans Europe, the Atlantic Ocean, the Caribbean, and South America, then geographic Europeanness makes little sense as a criterion for European

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Union accession. Accordingly, a map of Europe that represents continental and non-continental European territories as a single space and locates Europe’s current Western borders in South America and the Caribbean Sea is easily obtained through a shift of focus – zooming out from continental Europe to its American colonies (see Figure 20.5). As a critical tool, mapping Europe otherwise thus not only helps creolize our collective geographic imaginary, but also decolonizes the sociological notion of Europe as a historical, political, and economic space.

Statehood otherwise The textbook narrative about the emergence of sovereign nation-states in a postWestphalian Europe relegated both multinational polities and multiethnic empires to a past that unmarked Europe had supposedly overcome. Critical works in global history and the sociology of globalization have long insisted that France and Britain were not nation-states, but imperial polities in a system dominated by empires (Walby; Cooper). Similarly, legal scholars have countered the doctrine that international law is based on equally sovereign states by recalling that its specific purpose was fixing the unequal status of colonial territories on the basis of racial criteria of “civilization” (Anghie). José Manuel Barreto (2017) uses the case of the Netherlands as a sovereign state, empire, and colonial entrepreneur to show that not only the state but also the empire and the (colonial) company had from the very beginning of the Westphalian system been full subjects of international law and holders of sovereignty. From the perspective of the colonized, Barreto argues, the resulting structure is therefore not a one-body Leviathan, but a three-head Cerberus. Despite the mounting evidence for the long-term coexistence of imperial and national state structures up to the 19th and most of the 20th centuries, the dominant view is that they no longer coexist in the 21st century. State formations which, as the European and US Caribbean territories, are still colonized in the 21st century, continue to be viewed as exceptions from the textbook trajectory from empire to nation and as anomalies in a modern world of sovereign nationstates. Here, too, the history and present-day social reality in the Caribbean significantly contribute to a creolization of theory. A growing literature addresses the colonial logic behind the functioning of state structures in the non-independent Caribbean (Adler-Nissen/Pram Gad; Bonilla; De Jong/Kruijt, Lewis). Its aim is to stress that state sovereignty is an unmarked category derived from the particular history of Western Europe that can only produce deviance, exceptions, and anomalies when superimposed over colonized territories. The Caribbean, which, through the Haitian and the Cuban revolutions, has produced two of the most radical political transformations in the Western hemisphere, provides “a fertile site from which to contest, disrupt, and reimagine notions of sovereignty, autonomy, freedom, liberty, and self-determination beyond the canon of political theory” (Bonilla/Hantel). Viewing Caribbean Europe as an integral part of European states and supra-state organizations such as the EU or the British Commonwealth of Nations effectively

Figure 20.5 Map of Europe with current Western Borders in the South America and the Caribbean. Source: Enlarged fragment from Figure 20.2, public domain.

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creolizes the norm of the sovereign nation-state in the 21st century. The non-independent Caribbean encompasses multiple political forms and overlapping zones of affiliation that fall outside of the legal definition of either independent states or formal colonies (Bonilla 10). Thus, when the norm itself becomes questionable, it is not the non-sovereign, non-emancipated, or non-decolonized state structure that is in need of explanation, but the universality of the nation-state norm as well as the continuities of distinct formations to which it gave rise under colonial and imperial rule. Historian Frederick Cooper argued that France remained an empire-state for most of its modern history and that it is imperative to rethink France from its colonies. Yet he viewed Algeria’s independence as marking France’s transition from empire to nation-state. When taking France’s colonies in the Caribbean into account, however, the picture looks radically different. Neither did France become a nation-state in 1962, nor is it one now, when its Caribbean and South American colonies are even depicted on the Euro banknotes. But if France, the textbook example of the sovereign nation-state, has never matched the definition in classical political theory, why view the models of statehood, independence, and sovereignty that European states have been promoting to newly decolonized states in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean as the norm?

Brexit otherwise Both EU level and media discussions of Brexit-imposed borders have revolved around the problems posed by the Irish border as well as by Gibraltar – themselves colonial borders that have only become globally visible since their ambivalent post-Brexit status threatened to create immigration, customs, and trade chaos. The overwhelming vote to remain in the EU (96% in Gibraltar and 56% in Northern Ireland) was outweighed by the national leave vote. At the same time, British overseas territories were not given a vote in the referendum and their impeding hard borders have not yet been the object of Brexit negotiations, despite their representatives’ repeated pleas. Britain controls 14 overseas territories with different forms of statehood and degree of self-determination in the Caribbean, the West Atlantic, the South Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, the Pacific, and Europe (Clegg). Yet references to sovereignty during the Brexit negotiations rarely engaged these territories, except in the case of Gibraltar – the only one located in Europe and the only full EU member among them. Negotiations of the rights of British citizens after Brexit reinforced the image of only-white Britons in an exclusively white and Christian Europe (Benson/Lewis 2018). The Leave campaign used racialized images of immigration signaling to their voters that Brexit was about keeping the nation Christian and white (Virdee/McGeever). On the other side of the Atlantic, Anguilla, the oldest British colony and a British territory since 1650, offers a miniature mirror image of Britain’s political borders in the Caribbean. Just like Britain, Anguilla shares a maritime border with France through its own “English Channel” in the Caribbean – the Anguilla channel. It additionally borders the Netherlands to the south and depends upon

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both for trade and transportation: planes bound to Anguilla can only land on the Dutch island of Sint Marteen, while the only cargo port, through which Anguilla receives most goods, is in the French part of the island, St. Martin. Anguilla has no access to postal services, fuel, basic medical services, and educational special needs other than through the facilities located in the Dutch and French territories. The European Union is the island’s only source of significant development aid and is currently funding reconstruction projects after Hurricane Irma. Yet this funding would be cut off after Brexit, while Anguilla’s citizens would lose both EU citizenship and unencumbered access to medical care, postal services, and international travel. Tellingly, the Government of Anguilla has issued two reports signaling the urgency of these issues and detailing Brexit risks as well as possible bilateral agreements with the UK and the EU. Similar issues are being tentatively discussed with regard to other overseas territories affected by Brexit, yet none of their issues have made it into the negotiators’ agendas. In the event of a no-deal Brexit, Anguilla alone would thus account for an instant refugee population of British People of Color in Caribbean Europe. In the meantime, Anguilla’s population decreased from almost 17,000 people in 2016 to 13,500 in 2018 as people migrate in search of a less risky future. Forgotten Europes such as Anguilla and their corresponding forgotten borders might well be the magnifying glass needed in order to make the current implications of Europe’s long-standing colonial entanglements both visible and legible.

Creolization as an antidote of crisis Regional entanglements that have been structurally invisibilized for several centuries suddenly acquire visibility in times of political, economic, or ecological crisis. The aftermath of the devastating hurricanes in the Caribbean in 2017 has brought to the fore the ambivalent colonial status of Puerto Rico in relation to the United States and of French, British, and Dutch outermost regions and overseas countries in relation to the European Union. Repeated labor strikes in the French overseas departments throughout the 2000s, which have triggered the temporary shutdown of the European satellite launching station in French Guiana, have rekindled debates about the sovereignty of French Caribbean possessions in the face of mounting inequalities in the region. In most cases, the worldwide attention thus commanded is short-lived and does not lead to a systematic reconsideration of the mechanisms of invisibilization, or a questioning of the logic of the coloniality of memory underlying these territories’ lack of geopolitical visibility. Through the category of Caribbean Europe, the perspective delineated here has intended to show that creolizing Europe through the experience of its longest-standing colonies in the Caribbean offers a way out of periodically producing anomalies to a singular European norm. Thus, instead of explaining away those forgotten Europes that surface in times of crisis or relegating them to the status of exceptions, I suggest that crises – from hurricanes to Brexit – should be used as a magnifying lens for exposing ongoing colonial entanglements.

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Notes 1 This is an abridged and slightly revised version of an article published in Current Sociology, 2020. 2 The same applies to colonies of the United States such as Puerto Rico or Guam that seldom surface in official discourse as territories of the United States.

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Mintz, Sidney W. “The Localization of Anthropological Practice: From Area Studies to Transnationalism”. Critique of Anthropology 18 (1998): 117–133. Muller, Karis. “Shadows of Empire in the European Union”. The European Legacy 6, 4 (2001): 439–451. Patel, Sujata. “Beyond Binaries: A Case for Self-Reflexive Sociologies”. Current Sociology 54, 3 (2006): 381–395. Pries, Ludger. “Transnationalisierung und soziale Ungleichheit”. Transnationalisierung sozialer Ungleichheit. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften (2008): 41–64. Quijano, Aníbal. “Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America”. International Sociology 15, 2 (2000): 215–232. Randeria, Shalini. “Jenseits von Soziologie und soziokultureller Anthropologie: Zur Ortsbestimmung der nichtwestlichen Welt in einer zukünftigen Sozialtheorie”. Soziale Welt, 50, 4 (1999): 373–382. The Guardian. Our Hurricane-Hit Islands Deserve Aid. The Rules That Block it Are Wrong, 2017. www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/sep/19/hurricane-maria-car ibbean-oecd-aid-rules-assistance (21.12.2019). Therborn, Göran. European Modernity and Beyond: The Trajectory of European Societies, 1945–2000. London: Sage, 1995. The Telegraph. Britain Must Care for All its Citizens, 2017. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ opinion/2017/09/08/britain-must-care-citizens/ (22.12.2019). The Times. Hurricane Irma: Anguilla and Virgin Islands Are Expensive Legacy of British Empire, 2017. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/an-expensive-legacy-of-the-british -empire-nw3tllpsz (22.12.2019). Todorova, Maria. Imagining the Balkans. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. “The Caribbean Region: An Open Frontier in Anthropological Theory”. Annual Review of Anthropology 21, 1 (1992): 19–42. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Virdee, Satnam andBrendan McGeever. “Racism, Crisis, Brexit”. Ethnic and Racial Studies 4, 10 (2018): 1802–1819. Walby, Sylvia. “The Myth of the Nation-State: Theorizing Society and Polities in a Global Era”. Sociology 37, 3 (2003): 529–546. Wallerstein, Immanuel et al. Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996.

21 Visualizing the Black Mediterranean Michelle Murray

In 2014 at the Black Italia conference at New York University’s Villa La Pietra, postcolonial studies scholar Alessandra DiMaio coined the term “The Black Mediterranean,” which she asserts “focuses on the proximity that exists, and has always existed, between Italy and Africa, separated (…) but also united by the Mediterranean (…) and documented in legends, myths, histories, even in culinary traditions, in visual arts, and religion” (in Raeymaekers, “Racial Geography”). In addition to the implicitly positive connections DiMaio details, as Timothy Raeymaekers asserts, the Black Mediterranean increasingly references not only the crossroads between Africa and Europe geographically and socially apparent in the ocean and in the hybrid cultural forms emerging in these contact zones, but also the exploitation of migrant labor and the marginalization of migrants in European cities. Prior to these important dynamics of existing in and assimilating to life in Europe, “The Black Mediterranean” evokes both the ontology of the liquid border African migrants must traverse to access Europe and the heightened awareness of difference violently policed at increasingly militarized borders. Indeed, in my view, the term “The Black Mediterranean” most clearly implies the ongoing oceanic atrocities that migrants and refugees confront when they embark upon risky journeys in rickety fishing boats known as cayucos or pateras. These migratory patterns reflect the extent to which nation-states retain their sovereignty by preventing foreign entry, and capitalism avails itself of cheap, vulnerable laborers in the interest of profits. This chapter combines an analysis of race and racialization evident in the term “Black” with a focus on oceanic studies to “think with the water” as Kerry Bystrom and Isabel Hofmeyr suggest in their insightful thoughts on the oceanic turn in cultural studies. For this study, “hydro-colonialism,” a term that expresses the extent to which humans colonize by means of water; colonize the water; and create water colonies, such as a penal island, encapsulates the contributions of oceanic studies (1, 3).1 Moving towards a Black Mediterranean entails both acknowledging and “pushing against an entrenched colonial mapping of the oceans and its cultural legacies in supposedly postcolonial times” (Bystrom and Hofmeyr 4). Thinking about race and coloniality – the ongoing significance of colonialism in the current moment, to the perpetuation of colonial structures2 – through the water, this chapter theorizes visual engagements with the Black Mediterranean

290 Michelle Murray through readings of sculptures located near, alongside, and under the sea. My chapter focuses on two monuments: the Barcelona plaza and statute honoring the slave trafficker Antonio López y López and the underwater artwork “La balsa de Lampedusa” located within the Museo Atlántico off the coast of Lanzarote in Spain’s Canary Islands. My theorizing of “The Black Mediterranean” thus is not just a celebration of cultural linkages between parts of southern Europe, the Maghreb, and the Middle East, but a conscientious orientation to examine global, transoceanic connections. It is undeniable that race and migration are intertwined, visual phenomena. Lyndsey P. Beutin explains: Racialization and racial identity formation is [sic] a complex social process that, while not based in biology, has been consistently pinned on physical characteristics that stand in for group differentiation. My point in calling race a visual technology is to emphasize that racialization was invented as a socially useful process that serves power; and the visibility of racial difference has been key to how marginalization processes are operationalized. (11) Seeing blackness and being seen as black is not just a difference in skin color, but, as Martinican psychoanalyst Frantz Fanon reminds us, a corporeal schema that transforms into an epidermal schema rooted in racist and colonial histories that cultivated the terrifying Otherness of black people (84). It is important to point out that Fanon’s theorizing about these tensions emerged from being seen by a white child on a bus, a visual exchange with profound personal and social impact. Fanon writes, “I existed triply: I occupied space. I moved toward the other… and the evanescent other, hostile but not opaque, transparent, not there, disappeared. Nausea…” (84). This quote emphasizes the visuality of race – that is, being seen in a particular fashion – leading to an alienating splitting of the self that culminates in a violent destruction of one’s subjectivity. As Nicole Fleetwood postulates, “Blackness troubles vision in Western discourse. And the troubling affect of blackness becomes heightened when located on certain bodies marked as such” (6). Alessandra Raegno similarly contends that “seeing is seeing as” to describe the racial underpinnings of vision and looking (1; emphasis in original). Hence, even when presented with visual materials about race, both individual and collective divergences in ways of seeing and interpreting race and racism lead to different, frequently problematic conclusions. These are the racial dynamics underlying my theorizing of the sea through critical race theory to better understand the juxtaposed terms “Black” and “Mediterranean.” The visuality of migrants collectively construed as racialized others is a key issue in southern European nations like Spain where visibly white populations only began to receive immigrants of color from the global South in the late twentieth century. Despite its insularity, Spain was nevertheless integral to Western racialization projects, as George Mariscal argues, with medieval and early modern Spain providing “a large chunk of raw material upon which later forms of

Visualizing the Black Mediterranean 291 Western racism would be constructed” (10). Drawing upon the work of Foucault, Mariscal states: [D]iscourses about “race” ought not to be assigned to certain ethnic groups who then deploy them against other groups. Rather, “race” is a field of practices and discourses that provides a conceptual repertoire from which specific groups draw in order to consolidate privilege and further their political projects. (14) Much like Fanon, migrants today must confront a conceptual repertoire around race that precedes their arrival. Monuments engaging the “Black Mediterranean” similarly dialogue with this conceptual repertoire and attempt to challenge naturalized narratives of Europe based on the unquestionable Otherness of racialized and colonized people. As visual engagements with race in the Mediterranean, sculptures and statues inscribe new ways of thinking into the cultural landscape. For Dolores Hayden, “Because the urban landscape stimulates visual memory, it is an important but underutilized resource for public history” (47). Through my readings of monuments that gesture toward race and migration in the Mediterranean, I show the ways in which artists, activists, and individuals enter into a dialogue with race and its visuality to call attention to the ways that blackness, even when it is exploited, marginalized, or oppressed, remains a vital element of Mediterranean society that ought to be seen.

Monumental Mediterranean The statue of 19th-century negrero (slave trader)3 Antonio López y López (1817– 1883, henceforth López) once stood with its back toward the Mediterranean Sea and its concrete gaze focused on Barcelona’s bustling street Via Laietana in a symbolic posture that conveyed his personal trajectory from Spain’s American colonies to the Catalan metropolis. López’s biography remains inextricably linked to the Black Atlantic, chattel slavery in the Americas, and Spain’s colonial and imperial designs. That the Mediterranean forms a thread in the fabric of this narrative is key. The statue’s architects thought it necessary that López’s sculpture acknowledge his transoceanic crossings by situating him near the sea from where he would have embarked upon the life voyages that would have transformed him into a shipping magnate and an international impresario enriched through slavery.4 His company would become an international holding that developed both Cuba and the Philippines to fulfill Spain’s economic – and nationalist – desires as colonies. As Fanon states, racial alienation is the outcome of both economic processes and an interiorization of inferiority (4). The colony thus serves an economic rationality and gives the colonizing metropole a false sense of superiority. López eventually became the first marquis of Comillas (his birthplace), an honor conferred upon him by King Alfonso XII in 1878; and, in 1884, the statue under discussion was finalized by the leading architects of the day – including the

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renowned Antoni Gaudí – in a plaza that would also bear the slave trader’s name. The plaza and statue were cultural landmarks that served to exalt not just López specifically, but also more broadly operate as a visual celebration of the nationalist ideal of the successful indiano, a Spaniard who amassed tremendous wealth in the European nation’s colonies. The statue was controversial from its inauguration. As Akiko Tsuchiya points out, the 1885 publication of La vida verdadera de Antonio López [The True Life of Antonio López] by his brother-in-law Francisco Bru Lassús was a devastating portrait that denounced the businessman as a negrero (3). In Bosquexo del comercio del esclavo [Outline of the Slave Trade], Spanish abolitionist theologian Blanco White states that taking part in the slave trade made traders monstruous (59). For Lisa Surwillo, White’s treatise undercuts fin-de-siècle racial beliefs in severing external traits from character, soul, or essence (24); hence, like other negreros implicated in antislavery and abolitionist debates, López becomes an ambiguous figure indubitably sullied by his decision to participate in the trafficking of Africans. The López statue assumed greater political significance in the tense milieu of Republican Spain (1931–1939) and in the ensuing Franco dictatorship (1939– 1975). In August 1936, Catalan anarchists removed the statue, and its pedestal was covered with the black and red flag, a symbol of anarchist Catalonia. In 1944, during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1939–1975), the statue was restored by Frederic Marès, based on the original model (Tsuchiya 3–4). With this commissioning, the fascist, national Catholic dictatorship made plain its vision of Spain as an imperial power with overseas possessions. During Spain’s Transition to democracy in the 1970s, groups began calling for the monument’s removal yet again because of its colonial and fascist histories. Tellingly, migrants relocating to Spain from Africa from the late 1980s onward were pivotal to the Mediterranean plaza’s eventual transformation. As Mahdis Azarmadi and Roberto D. Hernández indicate, after pressure from numerous immigrant activist organizations “as well as antiracist organizations and civil society groups … the new municipal government of Barcelona finally agreed to rename the long-disputed Antonio López Plaza” (2). Barcelona’s global status as a site that receives African immigrants in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries thus enables a critical reflection on the role Africans and their labor have played in Barcelona, Catalonia, and Spain’s (ongoing) development. As Spain continues to be a desirable destination for migrants who relocate to its cities and depopulated rural areas increasingly lose inhabitants, the nation reconfigures itself around globalized metropolises like Barcelona where migrants and natives coexist, with each group’s mosaic of assumptions and cultural identities renegotiated through the realities of migration (Corbalán and Mayock ix–x). This activism evinces the ways that migrants, having embarked upon transoceanic voyages to access Spain, engage with the concept of the Black Mediterranean through their focus on the ways in which coloniality and asymmetrical power dynamics have sustained Western Europe and its riches, from the early modern era to the present.

Visualizing the Black Mediterranean 293 In June 2017, the union of African street-sellers gathered the 15,000 signatures necessary to propose to rename the plaza for Idrissa Diallo.5 The campaign Tanquem els CIE (Close the Detention Centers) and other activists joined forces with the union to protest in the plaza and to demand the change on June 17, 2017. I would like to focus on this proposal at length – even if it does not succeed – for its cultural implications. I begin by explaining the brief life of Diallo. On December 5, 2011, Diallo, a Guinean migrant, scaled the border wall in Melilla – a Spanish city located on the northwest coast of Africa – that separates Spain from Morocco. In Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, political theorist Wendy Brown interrogates the establishment of rigid, physical borders and the proliferation of walls and barricades to delimit national space. This walling occurs at a moment when national borders and boundaries are increasingly difficult to enforce. Globalization and immigration create tension resulting from the indeterminacy of national space occupied by mobile, foreign bodies. The physical structure of the wall allows for the imagination of a sealed-off community that counters the reality of a weak national border easily penetrated by immigrants. The border wall in Melilla is one such structure that not only signals the border security animating nationalist defenses of space, but also colonial logics wherein Spain continues to maintain overseas holdings in the Maghreb. Border agents apprehended Diallo in Melilla within 24 hours of his arrival. On December 20, he was transferred to an Immigrant Detention Center in Barcelona where he awaited deportation to Guinea; this circuitous route highlights the illogical measures states take to restrict migration. Two weeks later, on January 5, 2012, the 21-year-old Diallo died of heart failure. Weeks prior to Diallo’s death, on December 19, 2011, a similar fatality occurred at an Immigrant Detention Center in Madrid, where Samba Martine, a 34-year-old Congolese immigrant, died unexpectedly of meningitis after being detained for 38 days. Like Diallo, Martine had also been transferred from Melilla to Madrid. Artists Daniela Ortiz and Xose Quiroga paid tribute to Samba Martine by holding a procession with her image on October 12, 2012, the Fiesta Nacional de España/El día de la Hispanidad (the National Day of Spain), with stops at the Plaza de Colón, the former residence of Congolose businessman and politican Moisé Tshombe, the Aluche center where Martine was jailed, and the hospital where she died. Tshombe fled the Congo after taking part in the 1961 murder of Patrice Lumumba, a key leader in transforming the Congo from a Belgian colony into a democratic and independent republic. Tshombe’s refugee status in Spain for assassinating an anti-colonial, pan-Africanist, African nationalist leader avers the extent to which the Spanish nation-state participates in and benefits from colonialism, political instability, violent regime change, and economic precariousness in Africa. Ortiz and Quiroga’s performance, titled “Homenaje a los caídos” (“Homage to the Fallen”), creates important linkages between migration and colonial memory in Spain. Including Martine among the fallen for twenty-first-century Spain forms part of a broader, collective desire to recover historical memory. These processes are manifest in the artwork’s usage of the term caidos ‘fallen’, a word

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Figure 21.1 Diallo protest at the plaza.

that conjures up El valle de los caidos (The Valley of the Fallen), a national monument to those who died fighting during Spain’s Civil War. A polemical site, the Valley’s national depiction has changed through Spain’s 2007 Historical Memory Law and in the 2019 removal of Francisco Franco’s remains from the grounds.6 Hence, issues of memory recuperation in Spain would not only connect to the legal demand to unearth the histories of those oppressed during Franco’s dictatorship, but also shed light upon Spain’s colonial legacy. Coloniality lies at the crux of today’s migratory flows. Luis Martín-Cabrera writes, “Against the representation of migration in the media as a ‘sea,’ ‘invasion,’ or ‘irration eruption” (111–12), it makes sense to resituate these flows as “the repetition of colonial trends, and, on the other hand, the emergence of new dynamics of primitive accumulation of capital on both sides of the Atlantic” (112). Transoceanic flows pivotal to colonization and slavery inform Martín-Cabrera’s interpretation of representations of migrants today, proving the ongoing legacy of colonialism in present-day Europe and suggesting that colonial memory is an issue with which those northern states must grapple. As in 21st-century European laws calling for the removal of fascist, Francoist symbols from the public sphere, addressing colonial memory would involve questioning the commemoration of colonizers like Colón and López through national monuments that unquestioningly honor them. Indeed, critiques of colonial history must also “include attention to the popular or public sphere, where monuments and tourism—among other forms of remembrances—play a key role in reinforcing the colonial present”

Visualizing the Black Mediterranean 295 (Azarmadi and Hernández 8). In the case of Spain, “[the] Columbus monument erases the legacy of violence, war and genocide which made colonization possible. In turn, [the] Lopez … [monument] celebrates the profits of enslavement and continues to erase bodies which the colonial logic deemed disposable” (Azarmadi and Hernández 8). In both the performance artwork and proposal to rename the López Plaza for Diallo juxtapose colonizers and today’s migrants, the African figures become symbols of the migrant crisis in Europe and the enduring significance of Europe’s colonial past. In both cases, the visuality of race joins up with the visuality of statues and monuments designed to memorialize certain aspects of a shared, national history; and commemoration operates as a strategy to shape national identity, as shown in the responses to the López statue. Critical theorist Andreas Huyssen theorizes the role of statues and public memorials in his book Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Huyssen connects monuments to nationalist mythmaking, noting that “the search for national monuments first created the deep national past that differentiated a given culture from both its European and its non-European others… the monument came to guarantee origin and stability as well as depth of time and of space in a rapidly changing world that was experienced as transitory, uprooting, and unstable” (41). It is unsurprising that in 1884, at a moment of late 19th-century imperial decline, Catalan architects would pay homage to a successful indiano as a nationalist ideal. In the early modern period, both the Americas and extremely wealthy indianos who ventured there were viewed with racial suspicion, with indianos being retyped as Jews (Mariscal 14). In this way, paying homage to López could reflect Foucault’s theories about race in Society Must Be Defended, that is, that societies practice internal racism against themselves, one that consists of a “constant purification,” which becomes a cornerstone of normalization (55). Nationalist narratives represented López, the controversial indiano and negrero, as a hero through monumental myth-making. While racism and xenophobia complicate and distort the visuality of racialized others, as I stated earlier in this chapter, a Diallo Plaza – admittedly a controversial proposal that is unlikely to materialize – would operate as a counter-narrative to monuments dedicated to colonizers. Inaugurating a Diallo Plaza suggests that those oppressed by legacies colonialism and slavery ought to appear in national narratives rather than those who enslaved and oppressed. Memorializing a dead African immigrant like Diallo through a new monument would thus acknowledge the African deaths haunting the Mediterranean, and shed light upon the colonial past that once used racist discourse to control and exploit foreign populations. These dynamics remain evident in the present through biopolitical state procedures that manage and reduce immigrant populations, such as the walling and imprisonment Diallo directly endured during his short lifetime.

Reenvisioning waterways My aforementioned discussion of the Diallo Plaza as a visual cultural object that relates to the visuality of race in the Black Mediterranean also leads to the

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question of how monuments honor the dead. I have argued that the replacement of the López statue illuminates the extent to which monuments serve as visual cultural materials and shed light upon Spanish society’s shifting values. While the public square would make the dead visible, my second example problematizes visibility and foregrounds uncertainty and death integral to migrant narratives as a unique artwork located underwater. Jason deCaires Taylor’s 2016 “The Raft of Lampedusa” features migrants huddled in a precarious boat traveling from North Africa to Europe – specifically, Italy’s Pelagie Islands. Every migrant in the sculpture represents an actual person who made the arduous journey across the Mediterranean.7 Taylor found inspiration in the 1819 Théodore Géricault painting “Le Radeau de la Méduse” (The Raft of the Medusa), which depicts survivors of a colonial expedition shipwrecked off the coast of Africa (not far from Lanzarote, the site of the underwater sculpture). The French Royal Navy frigate did not have sufficient lifeboats for those on board; and the ten passengers who survived had spent nearly two weeks adrift at sea in a precarious boat that they built themselves. The colonial basis of “The Raft of the Medusa” is noteworthy. The painting depicts the types of transoceanic voyages that served to impoverish Africa for Europe’s benefit, laying the socioeconomic and nationalist foundations that generate today’s routes wherein African migrants travel to Europe in search of a brighter future. As with the subjects in the 1819 painting, Europe’s migrants endure both coloniality and wreckage in their arduous journeys via rafts across the Mediterranean. “The Raft of Lampedusa” is powerful in suggesting these linkages. As Saint Lucian poet Derek Walcott writes, in the absence of monuments, “the sea is history” (364). Iain Chambers argues that [t]o return to the sea, to a maritime discipline, is to unhook a particular language and its explanations from the chains of authority… In such a prospect emerges a diverse cartography whose continual transformation into a multitude of places enables the resonance and the dissonance disseminated in a Mediterranean modernity to be recorded in the interleaving of historical, cultural, and ecological complexities. (680)8 The liquidity and fluidity of the sea creates resonances with past voyages and produces forms of memorialization, revealing the tremendous complexity of the concept of the Black Mediterranean. “The Raft of Lampedusa” forms part of the Museo Atlántico located underwater, off the coast of Lanzarote, in the Canary Islands. Segal explains, “Taylor uses marine-grade cement with pH-neutral concrete that is nontoxic to local wildlife, and over time the statues increase marine biomass by accumulating coral on their surfaces. Each piece has a foundation plate that can be drilled and anchored to the sea floor” (PBS). So, each statue will transform into a man-made reef capable of enhancing biodiversity as time passes. Along with the museum’s main installation, “Crossing the Rubicon,” which shows individuals walking to a point of

Visualizing the Black Mediterranean 297 no return in a scenario symbolic of climate change, “The Raft of Lampedusa” sculpture also denounces ecological destruction and offers an example of the ways that artists and activists address and attempt to remedy the devastation of nature through their work. Taylor’s artwork not only examines African migration through the sea-based disaster of the shipwreck, but also looks to the water – the polluted water – that migrants traverse as a key component of the statue’s function. “The Raft of Lampedusa” thus begins an important reconsideration of waterways. Looking to the water is a formulation that diverges from that of the López monument, which looks to the Spanish nation and has his back to the Mediterranean Sea. López left the water rich, effectively having drowned others. Looking to the water not only involves recognizing the human devastation of the ocean, but also admitting that waterways serve as sites of human transit with dire consequences for Africans both in López’s day and now. For Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Taylor’s underwater sculptures represent the complexities of “sea ontologies” (33). Referring to the Atlantic and the routes of chattel slavery, DeLoughrey contends that the Ocean is “an unmarked grave site … an oceanic archive that lacks place-based narrative and rituals for memorialization” (35). Indeed, Taylor’s sculptures dialogue with histories of colonization and the uncertain future in an era of climate trauma. As DeLoughrey puts it, the sculptures are more temporally complex, suggesting that the ocean as medium can symbolize the simultaneity or even collapse of linear time, reflecting lost lives of the past and memorializing – as an act of anticipatory mourning – the multi-species lives of the future of the Anthropocene. (36) Engaging with colonial history to comment upon migratory routes and the oceanic pollution plaguing the earth’s waters, it is my contention that “The Raft of Lampedusa” uses the fluidity of the sea to call attention the problematics of memorialization in the Black Mediterranean, in an analogous fashion as the aforementioned debates surrounding the López statue. “The Raft of Lampedusa” is drowned to represent the thousands of deaths in the Mediterranean as migrants risk their lives in pursuit of a European dream. Ingeborg Eliassen reports that according to U.N. estimates, at least 5,096 people died or disappeared at sea while trying to reach European soil in 2016; this number is an increase from an estimated 3,771 deaths in 2015 and 600 in 2013 (Eliassen). No European authority has officially attempted to count and account for the dead; although the European coast guard Frontex uses satellites to monitor the seas, this information is transmitted to the Eurosur surveillance system for the purposes of reducing migration, preventing border crime, and saving drowning migrants (Eliassen). Hence, despite ample surveillance at the liquid borders of the Mediterranean, there is no actual record of the African lives lost although the EU has the technology to track some of these numbers. In their article critiquing Frontex for operating in a perilous humanitarian borderland that perpetuates policies that contribute to the broader

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precariousness of human life, Katja Franko Aas and Helene Gundhus argue that “it is precisely through the lack of a ‘will to knowledge’ about migrant mortality that the discrepancy between humanitarian and security considerations becomes most visible” (1, 10). The continent’s Mediterranean border tensions signal a broader disengagement with race and racial justice in contemporary, “postcolonial” Europe. The issues of counting, honoring, and recognizing life resonate with Judith Butler’s theories on what constitutes the livable and whose lives become counted and valid as human life (xx). Faced with state refusal to acknowledge migrant and refugee lives and deaths at the southern maritime borders of the Schengen area, artists and activists situated throughout the Southern Mediterranean respond. Some examples of remembrance include a cemetery that reserves part of its space for migrants in Castellammare del Golfo in Sicily. And since 2009, the Spanishbased group A Desalambrar has placed crosses on beaches to acknowledge the immigrant deaths at sea. These makeshift installations and memorials begin to spring up on both land and sea to humanize the dead and to bring collective awareness to the border crisis. “The Raft of Lampedusa” forms part of a corpus of visual engagements with migration in the Mediterranean. The sculptor states that the work is “a harrowing depiction of the ongoing humanitarian crisis”; yet, its function is not to commemorate the dead, but to call the living to action, “a stark reminder of the collective responsibility [sic] of our now global community” (Jason deCaires Taylor). Much like the Raft of the Medusa before it, “The Raft of Lampedusa” showcases the social ills that permit shipwrecks and the loss of innocent life with the aim of bringing about change. The image of the shipwreck is essential to the installation. The plight of today’s boat people and the precariousness integral to this mode of transportation conjure up memories of chattel slavery and the horrors of the Middle Passage. The drowned vessel in “The raft of Lampedusa” captures analogous dynamics in portraying the worst fate for a boat and its passengers in the Mediterranean. Arguably the most influential and powerful theorization of the water has been critical race theorist Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993), a study of black transnationalism through historical and philosophical frameworks. The ship is a pivotal element in his work, as well. Building upon the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, Gilroy offers the image of the sailing ship as a “chronotope” that signals several aspects of the Black Atlantic. He states, I have settled on the image of ships in motion across the spaces between Europe, America, Africa, and the Caribbean as a central organising [sic] symbol for this enterprise and as my starting point. The image of the ship — a living, microcultural, micro-political system in motion — is especially important for historical and theoretical reasons … Ships immediately focus attention on the middle passage, on the various projects for redemptive return to an African homeland, on the circulation of ideas and activists as well as the movement of key cultural and political artifacts: tracts, books, gramophone records, and choirs. (Gilroy 4)

Visualizing the Black Mediterranean 299 Like DiMaio who conceives of the black Mediterranean as a crossroads, Gilroy sees in the black Atlantic a space brimming with cultural possibilities borne out of the initial trauma of the “sailing” slave ships. Those sailing ships that defined Atlantic return, come back again in today’s Mediterranean, where African patera is the first step toward a journey that can culminate in exploitation or death. For Gilroy, “The specificity of the modern political and cultural formation that I want to call the black Atlantic can be defined, on one level, through this desire to transcend both the structures of the nation state and the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity” (19). I contest this notion. For, despite the ongoing technological advancements in travel and global connectivity, the nation-state retains its symbolic and material power, evidenced in the proliferations of border walls, which serve as both visual/symbolic and concrete reminders of the state violence to which migrant bodies are continually subjugated. Race, furthermore, remains a central element of social hierarchies, especially for African immigrants who continue to be constrained by ethnic distinctions, racism, and xenophobia in Europe. Finally, while Gilroy’s work offers invaluable insights, it simultaneously reveals a surreptitious Anglocentric trend in its reception insofar as theorists and cultural critics largely view global racial histories through the lens of the United States of America and its unique history of chattel slavery, segregation, and civil rights movements. Paul Tiyambe Zeleza has called into question the tyranny of hegemonic models in theorizing the Black Diaspora (2), for instance, the primacy of the United States and the Atlantic as the “root (‘route’) through which a distinct theory of movement as modernity is articulated” (Chude-Sokei 741). Examining “The Raft of Lampedusa” invites the viewer to contemplate what is hidden beneath the surface of the water. From vulnerable drowned humans to contamination and microplastics, the water contains harrowing stories of planetary devastation brought about by globalized capitalism. The transoceanic nature of the installation chips away at the primacy of the Black Atlantic to show the extent to which coerced migrations, slavery, and human trafficking continue to dehumanize certain populations long after the abolition of chattel slavery. The convergent ocean worlds of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean also evince the transnational flows central to theorizing race in a global context beyond the dominant frame of the United States. Charting a black Mediterranean means building upon the work of the black Atlantic and localizing sites of both struggle, solidarity, unfreedom, and freedom emergent from histories of colonialism, migration, and trafficking.

Notes 1 For information on Spanish political discourse and debates on penal colonies, see Vialette. 2 For further analyses of coloniality, see the work of Santiago Castro-Gómez and Ramón Grosfoguel, Enrique Dussel, María Lugones, Walter Mignolo, and Aníbal Quijano. 3 All translations are mine, unless otherwise noted. 4 López was born with scant resources and his fortune was largely amassed through his wife’s dowry; his father-in-law’s influence; and, to a lesser extent, his brothers-in-law’s

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collaboration. In this way, the slave trader’s fortune also shows the ways that traffic in women benefits men who derive both pleasure and profit from trading in and controlling women’s lives, bodies, and finances. Interestingly, Lamine Sarr, the spokesperson for the union who announced the proposal in 2017, was targeted for deportation less than a year later in November for making counterfeit clothing (García). One of the provisions of Spain’s Historical Memory Law (2007) was the depoliticization of the Valley of the Fallen, which included prohibiting political events there and recognizing Republican and Nationalist soldiers who had fought in the Civil War at this site. See “The Raft of Lampedusa Abdel” for an interview with Abdel, one of the migrants whose life and story inspired the sculpture. Important interventions in cultural studies–oceanic studies include special issues of PMLA (Oceanic Studies, 2010) and Comparative Literature (Oceanic Routes, An ACLA Forum, 2017).

Works cited Azarmandi, Mahdis and Hernández, Roberto D. “Colonial Redux: Antonio Lopez y Lopez and Nelson Mandela.” Borderlands E-Journal vol. 16, no. 1, 2017, pp. 1–27. Beutin, Lyndsey P. “Racialization as a Way of Seeing.” Surveillance and Society vol. 15, no. 1, 2017, pp. 5–20. Brown, Wendy. Walled States, Waning Sovereignty. Zone Books, 2010. Bru, Francisco. La verdadera vida de Antonio López y López. Tipografía de Leodegario Obradors, 1885. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso, 2006. Bystrom, Kerry and Hofmeyr, Isabel. “Oceanic Routes: (Post-it) Notes on HydroColonialism.” Comparative Literature vol. 69, no. 1, 2017, pp. 1–6. eDuke Journal Scholarly Collection. https://doi.org/10.1215/00104124-3794589. Accessed 15 January 2020. Castro-Gómez, Santiago and Grosfoguel, Ramón, eds. El giro decolonial: Reflexiones para una diversidad epistémica más allá del Capitalism Global. Siglo del Hombre Editores, 2007. Chambers, Iain. “Maritime Criticism and Theoretical Shipwrecks.” PMLA vol. 125, no. 3, 2010, pp. 678–684. Chude-Sokei, Louis. “Review: The Black Atlantic Paradigm: Paul Gilroy and the Fractured Landscape of ‘Race’.” American Quarterly vol. 48, no. 4, 1996, pp. 740–745. Taylor and Francis Online. https://doi.org/10.1080/14788810902981308. Accessed 15 October 2019. Corbalán, Ana and Mayock, Ellen. “Introduction: Spain’s Local Cities and Global Spaces.” Toward a Multicultural Configuration of Spain, edited by Corbalán and Mayock. Farleigh-Dickinson Press, 2015, pp. ix–xix. deCaires Taylor, Jason. The Raft of Lampedusa. Facebook, 4 February 2016. https://www .facebook.com/jasondctaylor/. Accessed 18 February 2020. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. “Submarine Futures of the Anthropocene.” Comparative Literature vol. 69, no. 1, pp. 32–44. eDuke Journal Scholarly Collection. https://doi .org/10.1215/00104124-3794589. Accessed 15 Janary 2020. Dussel, Enrique. 1492: El encubrimiento del otro: Hacia el origen del mito de la modernidad. Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, 1994. Eliassen, Ingeborg. “The Uncounted: Invisible Deaths on European Borders.” News Deeply, 16 February 2017. Web. Accessed 15 September 2019.

Visualizing the Black Mediterranean 301 Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. London: Pluto Press, 2008. Fleetwood, Nicole. Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness. University of Chicago Press, 2011. Foucault, Michel. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collége de France. Trans. David Macey. Picador, 2003. Franko Aas, Katja and Gundhus, Helene. “Policing Humanitarian Borderlands: Frontex, Human Rights, and the Precariousness of Life.” The British Journal of Criminology vol. 55, no. 1, 2015, pp. 1–18. Oxford Academic. doi:10.1093/bjc/azu086. Accessed 20 January 2020. García, Jesús. “El fiscal pide expulsar de España al portavoz de los manteros de Barcelona por falsificar ropa.” El País, 15 November 2018. Web. Accessed 9 January 2020. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Verso, 1993. Hayden, Dolores. The Power of Place: Urban Landscape as Public History. MIT Press, 1997. Huyssen, Andreas. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford University Press, 2003. Lugones, María. “Heterosexualism and the Colonial / Modern Gender System.” Hypatia vol. 22 no. 1, 2007, pp. 186–209. Project MUSE. muse.jhu.edu/article/206329. Accessed 18 February 2020. Lugones, María. “Toward a Decolonial Feminism.” Hypatia vol. 25, no. 4, 2010, pp. 742– 759. JSTOR. www.jstor.org/stable/40928654. Accessed 18 February 2020. Mariscal, George. “The Role of Spain in Contemporary Race Theory.” Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies vol. 2, 1998, pp. 7–22. JSTOR. www.jstor.org/stable /20641414. Accessed 19 January 2020. Martín-Cabrera, Luis. “Antagonismos poscoloniales: De la conversión cultural en La vida aquí al cosmopolitismo radical de Princesas.” Postcolonialidades históricas: (In) visibilidades hispanoamericanas/colonialismos ibéricos, edited by Ileana Rodríguez and Josebe Martínez. Anthropos, 2008, pp. 111–131. Mignolo, Walter. The Darker Side of Western Modernity. Duke University Press, 2011. Ortiz, Daniela. “Homenaje a los caidos / Tribute to the Fallen, 2012.” Àngels Barcelona. Web. Accessed 14 January 2020. Quijano, Aníbal. “Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo y América Latina.” Colonialidad del saber, eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales, edited by Edgardo Lander. CLASCO, 2000, pp. 201–246. Raengo, Alsessandra. On the Sleeve of the Visual: Race as Face Value. Dartmouth College Press, 2013. Raeymaekers, Timothy. “The Racial Geography of the Black Mediterranean.” The Dreaming Machine. 30 November 2017. http://www.thedreamingmachine.com/the-ra cial-geography-of-the-black-mediterranean-timothy-raeymaekers/. Web. Accessed 15 January 2020. Surwillo, Lisa. Monsters by Trade: Slave Traffickers in Modern Spanish Literature and Culture. Stanford University Press, 2014. Tsuchiya, Akiko. “Monuments and Public Memory: Antonio López y López, Slavery, and the Cuban-Catalan Connection.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts vol. 41, no. 5, 2019, pp. 479–500. Vialette, Aurélie. “The Spanish Carceral Archipelago: Concepción Arenal against Penitentiary Colonization.” Unsettling Colonialism: Gender and Race in the

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Nineteenth-Century Global Hispanic World, edited by N. Michelle Murray and Akiko Tsuchiya. SUNY Press, 2019, pp. 255–278. Walcott, Derek. Collected Poems, 1948–1984. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1986. White, Blanco. Bosquexo del comercio en esclavos. Ellerton y Henderson, 1814. Zeleza, Paul Tiyambe. “African Diasporas: Toward a Global History.” African Studies Review vol. 53, no. 1, 2010, pp. 1–19. JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24487603

22 “On behalf of vulnerable strangers” Interpreting communities-to-come1 Mina Karavanta

This chapter tries to reconstruct one of the many incidents of migrant crossings across the European borders in the Aegean Sea, taking its cue from the thesis that storytelling is an act of “survivance” (Vizenor 241) as well as “a form of ethical discourse” (Jackson 29). This particular incident is symptomatic of the larger scene of politics in Europe that has been caught in a double bind since the early 1990s when the Cold War officially ended.2 Seemingly adherent to the agenda of human rights, the European Union has fabricated this new era of migration as an exceptional event, which could threaten the democratic order and economic and political security of the Union. The fortification of its frontiers, the closing of borders, the patrolling of sea borders, and the complications that have resulted from the implementation of the Dublin Regulation reveal how the European Union has never been postcolonial; at least not if the term means the decolonisation of the political imaginary of Europe after the end of colonization and thus suggests a democratization of its borders and policies against the economic and political conditions that have resulted from the extended colonialism and current neoliberal practices of certain European states. Despite its multicultural and intercultural claims, the EU has consistently disavowed the existence of other subjects, their class, race, and gender struggles, and their forms of consciousness in its ideological and political terrains that do not accede to the demands of the “European Tribe” (Phillips).3 Its neoliberal politics has been further reinforced by the operation of the European Union as a “collection of ‘sovereign states’” divided into “creditor states in the North” and debtors in the South” (Spivak, “Europa and the Bull Market” 28). The following event that this chapter tries to reconstruct speaks to this paradox and the neoliberal subterfuges that it betrays.4 By drawing on a heterogeneous archive of reports, witness accounts and narratives recollected in Anestis Azas’s documentary play, “Case Farmakonisi or the Right of Water” (2015), this chapter examines this particular incident as symptomatic of the neoliberal subterfuges in Europe and as an event that can betray the promise of a different community poetics and politics. Farmakonisi is a small Greek island of the Dodekanese in the South Aegean, located a few miles off the coast of Asia Minor in Turkey. It became well known in 2014, when a dingy carrying refugees was overturned a few miles off its coast and eleven people drowned. The story would be yet another chapter in the ongoing

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history of the Black Mediterranean5 but the Farmakonisi case revealed the controversial refoulement and safe deterrence polices at the borders of Schengen Europe at a time when the financial crisis in Greece and the downsizing of the public sector and deterioration of the country's infrastructure overlapped with the refugee crisis and the growing demand for humanitarian aid. According to the report of the Greek Council for Refugees and a Greek network of lawyers and activists working for the social and legal support of refugees and migrants, in the early hours of June 20, a dingy that carried 27 refugees and included 4 women and 9 children from Afghanistan and Syria was spotted near the Greek borders and off the coast of Farmakonisi. The boat was overturned while being towed by the Greek Coast Guard. However, in the court trials that followed the events, the refugees reported that their boat had already approached the coast of Farmakonisi by the time they were intercepted by the Greek coast guard that tried to tow them back to the Turkish waters at such a great speed that the boat capsized and all of the passengers were thrown overboard. After the rescue of 16 of the refugees on board, the coast guard cut the rope and the dingy sank, dragging 8 more people to their death, 2 women and 6 children who had been trapped in its cabin. In the following days, the refugees contacted the representatives of the UN council of refugees to report the attempted refoulement that had led to the deaths of 11 of their fellow passengers. The coast guards refuted all such accusations by declaring that they had simply implemented the law that permits the protection of borders while prohibiting the refoulement or refugees, which is what the survivors of the shipwreck had testified. The case was further complicated when the coast guard officers accused a 21-year-old man from Syria, who was seen steering the boat at the time of its rescue or rather interception, of trafficking the refugees and causing the shipwreck to avoid criminal charges and thus hide among the victims. According to the Greek Council for Refugees, all of the survivors concurred with the Syrian’s claims that he was not their trafficker but one of the people onboard, who took over the boat and steered it when they were abandoned at sea; they also testified that they had been mishandled and violently treated by the local authorities and the coast guard officers during their rescue and upon their arrival on shore; these testimonies were corroborated by a sergeant’s account that detailed acts of violence against the rescued on the island.6 However, the Naval Court that tried the case and examined the charges filed by the rescued against the Coast Guard ruled that the evidence was insubstantial and closed the case, thus relieving the officers of all criminal charges. Instead, a case was filed against the Syrian who was tried on the charge of trafficking illegal immigrants for profit and eventually killing 11 of them. The court sentenced him to 145 years and three months of prison and a fine of 570.000 without the right to bail in the case of appeal. The irony is that they also charged him with six months and a fine of 500 euros for illegally crossing the borders and entering the country without documents. Five Greek and international organizations run to the aid of the Syrian refugee who not only appealed against the ruling but joined by his fellow passengers filed charges against the Greek State in the European court of Human rights. Three years later and after he served some time in prison, Hsran (not his real name

“On behalf of vulnerable strangers” 305 but what the police, mishearing his name, registered instead) was found not guilty and was released from prison. These events allude to a new divide between life and “Nonlife” (Povinelli, Geontologies 45) that further reinforces the racializing division between those who are recognized as transparent beings and subjects and those who “are the part that has no part” (Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment 73). For Elizabeth Povinelli, the neoliberal management of all the inert elements that are recognized as Nonlife and often represent the forces that reinvent life has led to the further denuding of indigenous lives and their sociopolitical imaginaries. The fog, the stream, and other such elements represent these inert sources of aesthetic, political, and social imaginaries that indigenous communities rely on for their “ survivance” (Vizenor 241). Strange as it is to turn to Povinelli’s text in view of the analysis of this particular story, Povinelli’s and other scholars’ critique of neoliberalism as the sweeping and rhizomatic force is very relevant. It reveals how neoliberalism manages not only the bodies and bios of human cultures but also a variety of elements that affect their relationship to the earth, what Latour calls “the right to soil” (Latour 15–16). This management of life and Nonlife reveals the ability of neoliberal ideology to determine and define the horizon of what it means to be human and manage the resources human beings rely on to expand that horizon and claim their right to belong. In other words, it is the backbone of a new chapter in race-thinking not “before racism” (Arendt 163) but after racism. In this particular case, the policing of borders via the refoulement or the safe deterrence of boats trafficking illegal immigrants and refugees was defended as the incontestable right of the nation-state to protect its sea borders. The policing of the sea borders which results in the deaths of human being does not only signify the erasure of these bodies as they end up residing in water. It also primarily means that their existence is sorted out as a “part that has no part…the noise of the unsayable—found neither on one side nor on the other of the temporal division of social space, but in the space that cannot be contained by this division” (Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment 73). Pushed back beyond the border, the refugees become existent forms identified with non-living materialities that can be managed like “Nonlife” (Povinelli, Gerontologies 45). Recognized only as part of the vessel at sea, they are not protected as life; the nation-state can thus forgo its obligation to abide by the 1982 United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea, which mandates that ships have a clear duty to assist those in distress.7 In Geontologies, Povinelli critically examines forms of Nonlife like the creek or the fog that are fundamental to the communities of the indigenous people in Australia for their survival but are recognized by neoliberal policies only as constitutive of cultural and thus racial differences. The indigenous people’s multiple usages of non-life forms like water or fog to reinvent a sense of commons and their attachment to land, water and its elements are seen as part of a social and political being that has “no part” (Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment 73). Povinelli argues that the power to distinguish between life that matters and Nonlife, and thus ascribe humans to the category of forms of existence that can be managed as if they were non-life

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cannot be adequately analyzed by biopolitics and its cognates. Crossing the borders, these migrants are not only threatened by the processes of “thingification” that make the other “an absolute alien, a foreign and alienated thing” (Chakrabarty 142), processes they face upon their arrival, but also by the borders that can liquefy their lives into material forms of existence that literally become non-life if they fail to cross them. Povinelli shows how late liberalism can turn certain humans into noise when “their otherness,” daring to speak through and against its dominant discourses, “threatens to shatter the framework of the liberal commons” (Geontologies 15). Lisa Lowe also stresses the point that the origins of neoliberalism can be traced back to the colonial difference and taxonomy, an event which, as she demonstrates in The Intimacies of Four Continents, even the “most astute analyses of neoliberalism fail to take into account” (Lowe 197).8 This genealogy of neoliberalism does not only pronounce the sustained complicity between the “liberal categories of development” and the “asymmetry of the colonial divisions of humanity” (16) but also the omission of the “global relations on which they depended” (16). This world of connections and affiliations, to invoke Edward Said, contradicts the liberal commons rife with the contradictions and social and economic unevenness that emerge from the conjunction of open-border policies that protect the circulation of goods, including a specific cheap manual labor force from the Third World, and closed borders that protect the sovereignty of nationstates from the unwanted migrants and refugees. In the case of Farmakonisi, this liberal commons was initially shielded from the testimonies of the others by policies that concerned the management of borders that can immunize the state against all illegal vessels and forgo the rights of these others by pushing them back and away from the liquid frontiers of the state. However, the remaining and persistent presence of life returning in the form of the bodies of the drowned people demanded that some of these lives be answered to and justice be served. The charges were made against the young Syrian man, who was the minority on board traveling in a group of refugees from primarily Afghanistan. In this particular case, Hsran came to embody a radical difference that is the ghost haunting Europe on its shores today, namely, the Arab rogue, a human being reduced to a figure that has been misconstrued and targeted, especially in the wake of a war on and of terror throughout the 21st century. As Jacques Derrida argues in Rogues and other texts,9 the question of the Arab other is the haunting question of democracy, especially after 9/11 and the war on terror. Hsran exemplified the rogue other as a male Arab who arrives from a so-called rogue state and whose origins can be traced to state sovereignties and cultures that are represented as non-reciprocal and, thus, unaccountable to western democracies. Hsran thus appears as a non-transparent, and, thus, potentially threatening being, the opposite of what Denise Fereira Da Silva calls the “homo modernus” to refer to the western construction of the subject as the immediate effect of an ontological and political transparency that axiomatically fits the social and political categories of the subject and thus has the right to give an ontological account of herself/ himself. This transparency thesis (Da Silva) is secured by the racial and national assemblages “that still govern the global present precisely because of the way

“On behalf of vulnerable strangers” 307 each refers to the ontological descriptors—universality and historicity—resolved in the figure of the Subject” (Da Silva 3–4); it is race and its differential practices that connect the minor histories that now “crowd the symbolic postmodern salon” (180), those whose noisy emergence both announced the fall of the modern subject only to reinstitute it as the dominant political being. The minority histories of the dispossessed are multiple and transnational and range from “the maquiladora workers in Tijuana […] to the black and brown teenagers killed by police officers in Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, and Caracas” (Da Silva xxiv). Such histories demonstrate how, albeit fragmented, shattered or incomplete, the subject as a western modern invention remains as the measure of humanity that separates beasts from humans, modern subjects from natives and subalterns, citizens from rogues. The case of Farmakonisi, whose name signifies both pharmako (medicine) and pharmaki (poison), salvation and death, cure and contamination, became the stage where the policing of borders in the name of the democracies that sprawl behind them would reveal the new forms of racialization at hand. The pharmakon, in other words, the policing of the frontiers, necessitates the poison, which implies the management of the life of the refugees as one would manage toxic waste or the invasion of the threatening virus or lethal weapon.10 Managed as such a foreign body that flows past the borders and has to be towed away back to the point of departure, the Turkish coast, the migrant is reduced to a non entity’ not simply a clandestine immigrant, what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life” (Agamben 100), but rather a form of non-life that can be processed, managed, and, if necessary, extinguished. However, this new form of late liberal power is manifested in the grey zone that emerges when the right of the nation-state to protect its borders conflicts with the unconditional priority of human life and human rights. But this conflict is produced by neoliberal capitalism that is responsible for a number of the causes of the refugee crisis: geopolitical wars, ecological disasters, the massive dispossession of native and indigenous communities, and the destruction of their sociogenic codes and poetic mechanisms (Wynter 47). The resistant perseverance of these communities against a global governance that actually forces people into migration and a prolonged refugee status for millions of people has yet to be addressed. And as it is not, the management of life as non-life with the power of this crucial distinction remaining in the hands of the authorities that provide the framework of reference contributes to the racialization of the body of the refugee and the migrant. She emerges as “the new subaltern” (Spivak, “Europa and the Bull Market” 34), whose presence raises the question of justice as irreducible to and incommensurable with the current fragile democracies shored up with fences and surrounded by camps. In this case, this new subaltern at the bottom of the “global laundry lists” (Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 308) is the male Arab refugee or migrant, who is represented as a rogue, and considered to be a threat not only as a possible terrorist hiding in the crowds of refugees but primarily as the incubator of Islamic fundamentalism and its parochial tradition that is spreading in the European cities to colonize them in numbers by overpopulating their democracies with the bodies of these rogue others that will eventually destroy western civilization, or so the fable goes. This other, a foreign body,

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whose lethal power is its human ability to procreate, is seen as a biological threat, a virus or toxic waste that, once implanted in the soil of western democracies, can grow into a dangerous habitat that can colonize and destabilize the European morals and values from within the territory of Europe. These bodies have to be managed not like the humans who are less than human, beasts and animals, but rather as the foreigners who assume the form of non-life arriving in numbers, without documents, indistinguishable from each other, and therefore a crowd, a flow, a tidal wave, a weapon, and more lately a toxic sperm that can disseminate Islamism in Europe and across the western world. In other words, they represent a biological threat that has to be treated like a dangerous virus that can vanquish democracy and human life; and thus a threat that should be managed like a virus that threatens the immunity system of democratic sovereignty and can trigger its “autoimmune pervertibility” (Derrida, Rogues 34). Derrida’s appropriation of the biological metaphor of autoimmunity is very appropriate in this case. What is of particular relevance is Derrida’s insistence on affiliating two phases of modernity that relate to this “autoimmune pervertibility” (34), namely, colonial modernity and the post-9/11 state-of-emergency period. He argues that “colonization and decolonization were both autoimmune experiences wherein the violent imposition of a culture and political language that were supposed to be in line with a Greco-European political ideal […] ended up producing exactly the opposite of democracy” (35). In the case of the current representation of the refugee and the migrant as a predominantly fundamentalist male and Muslim Arab, democracy is called upon “to protect itself against the aggressor (whether from within or without)” (35). However, the fear that is spreading about the absolute stranger and his cultural difference often reduced to the terrorist acts of Islamic fundamentalism is really rooted in new racializing and, thus, racist practices; this body is a threat because of its ability to procreate and genetically inseminate European cultures with the new threatening gene that breeds Islam, traditionalism, roguishness. This new object of racism, the Arab rogue, conjures a symbolic network that connects the past of colonial modernity with the present: the harem, terrorism, the disintegration of democracy from within and tyranny. The recent poster of the AFD party in Germany reproducing Jean-Leon Jerome’s “Slave Market” exemplifies the fear that Germany and by extension white Europe will be turned into a slave not somewhere in the remote Orient but on the green laws of European civilization. Germans can indeed reproduce their own German people if they can keep the white female bodies uncontaminated by the Oriental men who have trespassed the borders. The painting, a typical orientalist painting that expresses the 18th-century fascination with the other, the Oriental man as the predator of white flesh, and is inscribed in the long history of colonialism, is here reproduced as a scene from the past flooding into the present, the quiet and civilized life of western democracy that runs in tranquility in the background of the poster; interrupting this life, the poster becomes a word of warning about the future: “So that no Eurabia can come out of Europe.” This call for the “European tribe” (Phillips) to immunize itself against the Arab is symptomatic of what Derrida calls the autoimmune syndrome that brings

“On behalf of vulnerable strangers” 309 democracy to the remaining “apparent options” of “murder and suicide” (35). In the case of the refugee crisis, this syndrome refers to the dehumanizing conditions to which the asylum seekers have been subjected, the deaths and disappearance of many of them, as well as to the rise of xenophobic discourses, neo-racisms, nationalisms, and even neo-nazisms. This phenomenon is both an act of murder and suicide of the democratic imaginary that is reduced to a “common of community having in common the same duty of charge as the immune” (35), that is, the protection against the “other of democracy” (33). The racist injunction of the poster “So that no Eurabia can come out of Europe” offers a very pragmatic response to the task of imagining the future against the bleak reality of western, Christian, and white civilization inseminated by its racial and rogue others or as anything other than a war between religions and cultures. Alas, it gains momentum as it represents itself as the only pragmatic solution to the problem of numbers. As the numbers of refugees and economic migrants crossing the Aegean are increasing and the refugee shelters on the islands house three and four times as many people as they can possibly accommodate, violence on the camps and at the sea borders is also soaring. The double bind of overpopulation and inadequate infrastructure raises concerns about the viability of the democratic welfare state and the human lives and their rights that its structures should protect at all costs and can result in reactionary measures and policies. This danger is shown in the decision of Ursula Von Der Leyen, the President of the European Commission, to call the position of the migration commissioner, “the vice president for protecting our European way of life” that, after the outrage that followed, changed into “promoting our European way of life.”11 Such phrasings beg the question about the demos this “our” refers to and the kind of European values the European parliament decided to protect and promote. Hsran’s case, to return to the falsely accused, the drowned and the dead, also reveals the potentiality of what I call communities of resistant perseverance that are formed on behalf of the vulnerable people, citizens and xenoi fighting for justice, democracy, and human rights together; these are what Patrick Chamoiseau poetically refers to the “ecosystems not of the nation but of relation” (Chamoiseau 93) and, in another but relevant context, Derrida calls “communities of the world” (Derrida, The Beast and The Sovereign Volume II8). These ecosystems symptomatically reveal a “mondialité” (Chamoiseau 53), a worlding that opposes globalisation effected by late liberalism. Chamoiseau argues that globalization is not only the economic phenomenon of dispossession and exploitation but also a planetary condition which “propels our idea of the human towards a horizontal plenitude that arises from what lives on the earth” (54–55). He thus calls for an ecumenical politics of solidarity that sees the migrant crisis not as a new but as an old and recurrent phenomenon that can be traced back to the dispossession of the enslaved and the systematic trafficking and enslavement of human beings throughout the centuries. Focusing on the continuity between the old and new histories of dispossession, Chamoiseau reconceptualizes the nation not as a point of fixity and immobility but as a constellation of what he calls lieux vivants [vibrant places] (63). Such spaces receive and gather the transcultural contacts that make up the

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modern nations and represent what he calls the “archives of ancient communities” [“les archives des vieilles communautés”] (63). In the case of Farmakonisi, the Aegean surfaces like such an ancient community of contacts and exchanges that vibrates with the materiality and living force of the communities to come; such a community was formed as a response to the call of the survivors and in the name of the dead who witnessed the disaster in its totality. A group of Afghanis, a Syrian, the network of lawyers, the council for refugees, the local people who did offer help at times openheartedly, at other times grudgingly, the Greek sergeant who testified against the authorities, but also a group of artists, photographers, and activists who worked on the thousands and thousands of pages of legal documents that compile the archive of the case in order to produce a documentary play that would alert the public in the effort to re-present the event and speak to rather than for the silenced and the accused, formed a community of resistant perseverance seething with the contradictions arising from the conflict between ethics and politics, the urgency of human needs, and the mandates of the law. The ecosystem of this particular community is best represented in Anestis Azas’s documentary play, “Case Farmakonisi or the Right of Water” that draws on a thick archive that Azas and his team closely compiled. The play begins with a description of the accounts given by the coast guards represented by actors who recount the supposedly incontestable facts of the case and proceeds with the deconstruction of these facts by a number of side witnesses: Giorgos, a photo journalist working on the border, Vassilis, an activist, the lawyer defending Hsran, Yonous Muhhamedi, the President of the Greek Forum of Refugees and Board Member, and, finally, Hsran, the refugee who stays in the shadows and whose voice is heard at the end of the documentary against a black background. The refugee’s voice interrupts the hundreds of pages pinned on the wall in the background of the stage and reminds his audience that this is a particular story and history and that the witness cannot be substituted, despite the representations that use him as a figure in an effort to expand the ethical horizon beyond the borders that delimit it. The voice registers the imperative need to avoid reducing the migrant to a silenced figure by decontextualizing the practices that sublate the concrete and individual histories and stories into the larger trajectory, tendency or movement. The sublation can result in the forgetting or abandonment of the specificity of the story’s details, and the histories that account for the migrant’s dispossession and movement and the migrant can thus be depleted of her concrete materiality as she is turned into a figure, that is, a “vague essence” (Nail16). While this theoretical abstraction might be needed to map the histories of movement and migration for the purpose of opening the ethical horizon of the human and delinking it from the dividing line between life and non-life, the specific stories and histories foreground what is left out, the acts of agency, resistance, and the political, social, and ethical work of dissent that the migrants, citizens, and citizens xenoi12 perform while forming these communities of proximity and relation struggling for justice and their rights to human and democratic rights. Hsran is the subaltern who cannot speak and, at the same time, can and does speak. In this double bind of silence and representation, his voice, albeit untraceable, is intractable.13 His disappearance behind the camera that records only the voice and

“On behalf of vulnerable strangers” 311 throws no light on the body that remains unseen conjures the ongoing arrival of the migrants and the refugees whose bodies are photographed and reproduced by the lens often by way of anaesthetizing the viewer to their pain and prolonged affliction. However, it also marks the disappearance of those who never arrive; their drowned bodies, at times washed on the shores and buried unmourned and at other times resting on the ocean floors, cover the ground of these ancient spaces that Chamoiseau poetically refers to as the soil of nations to which every human has an unconditional right (Latour). Hsran’s voice echoes the drowned cries of the disappeared, his body in the shadows marking the absence of those who will not be mourned. The figure of the clandestine immigrant washed on the Mediterranean shores with a taciturn, albeit persistent claim, that she be recognized as a citizen/xenos, the human with an unconditional right to a polity, is the challenge to community politics and poetics in Europe and other places in the world in the present. Hsran’s case reveals an extended community of people working together in the name of justice and rights. This case can be an example of what this alternative politics might be like. Whether this promise will be materialized as an affirmation of the human or not depends on the democratic practices of subjects, citizens, and citizen/xenoi, all human standing together against the neoliberal ideology. Narratives like the documentary play archive and thus nourish, cultivate, and disseminate the idea of a democracy, which “lets singular beings live together” even when, especially when they are not yet defined by citizenship, that is, by their condition as lawful subjects in a state…confederation…or world state” (Derrida, “Real and Symbolic Suicides” 130). They represent “communities of belonging” that “refuse alignment along the secure axes of filiation to seek expression outside if not against possessive communities of belonging” (Gandhi 10) being formed “on behalf of vulnerable strangers” (Gandhi 189). They represent the demos as the perseverance of the “incalculable singularity of anyone” whose appearance simultaneously forms the demos, “beyond every ‘state’, indeed every ‘people,’ indeed even beyond the current state of the definition of a living being as living ‘human’ being, and the universality of rational calculation, of the equality of citizens before the law…” (Derrida 120). Where laws and politics have failed, we can rely on the revolutionary imaginary potential of narratives that pass on what it means to be human together, refusing to sink.

Notes 1 The phrase quoted in the title belongs to Leela Gandhi (Affective Communities). 2 See Robert Barsky’s “The Chronotope for the Convention Refugee Hearing” in Constructing a Productive Other. 3 See Paul Gilroy’s After Empire and his analysis of race thinking in “Race and the Right to be Human.” 4 Mr. Anestis Azas has sent me the unpublished manuscript of his documentary play and given me his permission to refer to it in this chapter. He has also sent me a video recording of the performance of the play during the 2015 Athens Festival. I thank him for his generosity and spirit of solidarity. 5 See Iain Chambers’ “Off the Map: A Mediterranean Journey” and his analysis of the Solid Sea project run by the Milan-based team Multiplicity. See https://iffr.com/en/2003 /films/solid-sea

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6 See the “Briefing on the Investigation into the Farmakonisi Boat Wreck of 20.1.2014” at https://www.gcr.gr/en/ekdoseis-media/echr-cases/echr-cases-decisions/item/413 -farmakonisi-breafing-latest; “Farmakonisi Case: Syrian Refugee and Survivor discharged by court” at https://www.proasyl.de/en/news/farmakonisi-case-syrian-refugee -and-survivor-discharged-by-court/; and Salvatore Palidda’s Governance of Security and Ignored Insecurities in Contemporary Europe. 7 See https://www.nortonrosefulbright.com/en/knowledge/publications/09f857fc/therescue-of-migrants-at-sea---obligations-of-the-shipping-industry 8 As Lisa Lowe remarks, the “forgetting of colonial difference in the accounts of neoliberalism” is indissolubly related with “mourning Western liberal democracy as the only form for imagining “the political” (197). In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh also argues that several accounts of the “anthropocene” overlook the continuity between “empire and imperialism” (87) and its effects on the climate and migration crisis. 9 See “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides—A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida,” “Faith and Knowledge” and Islam and the West. 10 In Azas’s play, one of the Syrian refugees recounts how “dawash yunanin,” what the Syrians call “Greek medicine,” is the name for medicinal herbs and other forms of cure that are sold in the local market. It is interesting that, in this context, Greece is identified with the therapeutic force of the medicine rather that with poison and death, as in the case of crossing borders. 11 See “Outrage over ‘protecting our European way of life’ job title” at https://www .politico.eu/article/outrage-over-protecting-our-european-way-of-life-job-title/ and “Protecting Our European Way of Life’? Outrage Follows New E.U.” at https://www .nytimes.com/2019/09/12/world/europe/eu-ursula-von-der-leyen-migration.html 12 I borrow this term from Lucas Paleocrassas’s documentary “Citizen Xenos” (2018), which documents the living and dehumanizing conditions of the refugee shelters in Mytilini and Chios. 13 I am alluding to Spivak’s seminal analysis of representation and re-presentation in “Can the Subaltern Speak?.”

Works cited Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel HellerRoazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harvest Books, 1973. Azas, Anestis. “Case Farmakonisi or the Right of Water.” Unpublished manuscript. Barsky, Robert F. Constructing a Productive Other: Discourse Theory and the Convention Refugee Hearing. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1994. Borradori, Giovanna. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Habitations of Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Chambers, Iain. “Off the Map: A Mediterranean Journey.” Comparative Literature Studies, 42, 4 (2005): 312–327. Chamoiseau, Patrick. Frères Migrants. Paris: Seuil, 2017. Derrida, Jacques. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes. London: Routledge, 2001. Derrida, Jacques. “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone.” Acts of Religion. Ed. Gil Anidjar, Trans. Samuel Weber. New York: Routledge, 2002. 42–101.

“On behalf of vulnerable strangers” 313 Derrida, Jacques. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford: Stanford University Press 2005. Derrida, Jacques. “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides—A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida.” Philosophy in a Time of Terror, Ed. Giovanna Borradori. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005, 85–137. Derrida, Jacques. The Beast and the Sovereign II. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Gandhi, Leela. Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2016. Gill, Nick and Anthony Good, Eds. Asylum Determination in Europe: Ethnographic Perspectives. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Gilroy, Paul. After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture. London: Routledge, 2004. Greek Council of Refugees. Farmakonisi Case: Syrian Refugee and Survivor Discharged by Court. https://www.gcr.gr/en/ekdoseis-media/echr-cases/echr-cases-decisions/item /413-farmakonisi-breafing-latest Jackson, Michael. The Politics of Storytelling: Variations on a Theme by Hannah Arendt. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2002. Latour, Bruno. Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Change. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Polity, 2018. Lowe, Lisa. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. Nail, Thomas. The Figure of the Migrant. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. Palidda, Salvatore. Governance of Security and Ignored Insecurities in Contemporary Europe. New York: Routledge, 2016. Phillips, Caryl. The European Tribe. London: Vintage, 1987. Pro Asyl. Farmakonisi Case: Syrian Refugee and Survivor Discharged by Court. https ://www.proasyl.de/en/news/farmakonisi-case-syrian-refugee-and-survivor-discharged -by-court/ Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1994. Silva, Denise Fereira da. Toward a Global Idea of Race. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLD-vXCAlvg Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988, pp. 272–313. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “The New Subaltern: A Silent Interview.” In Mapping the Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial. Ed. Vinyaak Chaturvedi. London: Verso, 2000. 324–340. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Europa and the Bull Market. Athens: Nissos Publications, 2013. 15–38. Vizenor, Gerald. Native Liberty: Natural Reason and Cultural Survivance. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. Wynter, Sylvia. “1492: A New World View.” Race, Discourse and the Origin of the Americas. A New World View. Eds. Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995. 5–57.

Index

Page numbers in italic denote figures. affect(ive) 3–5, 7, 27, 31, 37, 44, 58, 62, 94, 110, 120, 132, 134, 140, 161–162, 170, 176, 228, 248, 280, 285 Agamben, Giorgio 45, 53, 101, 114, 243, 307 agricultural 69, 81, 205; activities 8, 170; advancements in 186; biodiversity 173; credit system 162, 169; development 175; industries 49; intensification of 186; intervention 173; land 128, 161; production 157, 159, 173; region 161; system 185; workers 32, 80, 192 Aldaoud, Jimmy 57, 61–62, 67 Amazonia 159, 163, 173 Andean 173; Amazon Monitoring Project (MAAP) 161–162; civilizations 159; peoples 177; region 158; territory 157 Anguilla 279, 281, 284–285 antagonism 52, 204–206; political 52 anti-drug militarization 224 anti-racist 207 archipelago thinking 265 Arendt, Hannah 53, 89, 91–92, 215–216, 305 asylum 20, 58, 64–65, 93–94, 99–100, 103–104, 241; application for 110, 250; approval of 104; cases 64; colonial 93; decision 242; granting 100–101, 240–241; humanitarian 64; interview 242; mental 93; -migration nexus 184; petitioning for 251; policies 100; political 251; requests 103; -seekers 6, 99–101, 103–104, 108, 146, 184, 213, 219, 240, 250, 309 Atlantic Ocean 277, 281 Azas, Anestis 12, 303, 310 Azoulay, Ariella 72–73, 78–79

barbed wire 6, 18–19, 22, 84–94 biocapitalism 2, 4–5, 44–45; contradictions of 44; effects of 5, 43; financial matrix of 51; global 48, 51; logic of 108; strategies of 5, 12; violent 114 biopolitics 2, 4–5, 21, 27, 32, 45, 212, 221, 306 Black Mediterranean 289–292, 295–297, 299, 304 Blasim, Hassan 58 body 5, 8, 29, 35, 44, 57, 61, 66–67, 89, 100–102, 260, 282, 307–308, 311; broken 188; child’s 244; collective 176; foreign 307; ideological 8; ill 244; legal 248; parts 65; physical 8; subsumption of 5; vulnerability of the 6; young 244 border: art 120–126, 129; -as-habitat 123; Brexit-imposed 284; centrality of 27; classification 36; closed 43, 303, 306; colonial 271, 284; complexities of 38; configurations of 9; control 18–19, 24, 45; crime 297; crisis 110, 193, 298; cross- 4–5, 27, 103, 251; crossing 2, 6–7, 31, 36–37, 84, 87, 93–94, 105, 112, 126, 191, 251, 306; culture 34–35; demarcations 31; dwellers 122, 124–125; ecology 7, 120, 123–126, 129; elusiveness of 18; enforcement 3, 122; external 280; fences 19, 87–88, 91, 93, 121–122; fortifications 1, 7, 91, 93; geopolitical 17–18; guards 36, 71, 84; hard 284; hardening of 19–20; heterogeneity of 17; imperial 263; installation 122–123, 129; international 61, 121, 212, 213; -lands 11, 22, 91, 121–122, 124–125, 258–259, 263–265, 297; language 34–35; liquid 1, 17–18,

316

Index

266, 289, 297; maritime 18, 22, 280, 284, 298; militarized 2, 36, 64, 289; national 1, 30, 258, 293; open 23, 306; patrol 122, 126; physical 293; political 11, 32, 284; regime 5, 19, 21–22, 48, 57–58, 65; -scapes 7, 100, 104–105, 258, 264; Schengen 19; sea 303, 305, 309; security 122, 293; struggles 5, 100; studies 17, 38; tensions 298; territorial 258; thinking 124–125, 129; thresholds 36; trans- 30–32, 38; walls 19, 123, 293, 299; worlds 31, 33–34, 37–38; zones 27, 32, 34–37 Bracero Program 5, 36, 69, 71, 192 braceros 69–73, 75–82 Brazil 9–10, 28, 100, 107, 162–163, 199, 240–251, 280 Brookings Institution 218 Canton Insane Asylum for American Indians 93 Caribbean 11, 27, 36, 184, 257, 259, 261–264, 266, 271–274, 277, 278, 279– 282, 283, 284–285, 298; archipelagos 263; basin 263; borderlands 264–265; British 280; colonies 277; creolized 11; critical repertoire 260; critique 265–267; discourses 263, 265; Dutch 277; Europe 271, 277, 279–282, 285; French 285; identities 264; indigenous peoples 272; modern 273; non-independent 280, 282; pluriversality 260; regionality 261, 263; religiously syncretic 273; revolutions 263; Sea 271, 280–281; slavery in 272; social formations 11; territories 262, 277, 279–280; US 282 Catholic commonwealth 146, 155 Central America 2, 34–35, 59, 107–108, 110–111, 113–115, 188, 251; caravan arrivals 108; immigrants 107; migration 4, 6, 27, 29–30, 33, 88, 107–111; nationals 59; Northern Triangle of (NTCA) 28, 107; population 6; violence in 107; women 110–111 Ceremonies of reciprocity 175 chacra 173–174 Chamoiseau, Patrick 309, 311 clerical masculinity 145 Colombia 10, 28, 34, 107, 163, 179, 212–214, 219–221, 233–235, 241, 250; Afro- 212; army 227; ex-guerrillas 205; government 214; insurgencies 233; pre- 177; society 214 coloniality 11, 48, 187, 190, 203, 206, 261, 273, 289, 292, 294, 296; analysis of

203; of memory 277, 279–280, 285; of migration 184; ongoing 277; of power 47, 203, 267, 277, 279 communal-territorial citizenship 170 community 3–5, 53, 89, 102–103, 146, 163–164, 169–171, 175–176, 179, 188, 219–220, 226, 246, 248, 258–259, 267, 279, 293, 303, 309–311; ancient 310; autonomous 274; caring 214; democratic 206; economy 220; endangered 163; global 298; groups 53; humanitarian 215; Indian 177; indigenous 170, 176; international 29, 218; Jewish 170; jurisdiction 178; life 72; local 226; member 72, 170; minority 58; non-combatant peasant 220; organized 89; political 53, 266, 311; semi-contracted 163; sense of 4, 151–152; stigmas 111 conuco 173 cosmologies: African 265; cosmoscentric 174; Mesoamerican Indian 174; polycentric 174 cosmopolitanism 11, 257, 267 creolization 11, 257, 259–261, 264–267, 271, 273–274, 279, 282, 285 Cuba 11, 33, 201, 257–259, 261, 263, 266, 282, 291 culture of economy of profit 175 culture of economy of use 175 Da Silva, Denise 306–307 decolonization 279, 308 deforestation 8, 157, 161–163, 191 Deng, Francis 217–219 deportation 2, 5, 33, 48, 57–63, 71, 88, 91, 108, 110, 205, 293; camps 2, 6; orders 57, 59, 63; regime 57, 59, 63; terror 57, 59 Derrida, Jacques 62, 306, 308–309, 311 Diallo, Idrissa 293, 294, 295 diaspora 8–9, 57, 63, 176, 264; African 258, 260–261, 264; Arab 261, 264; Asian 261, 264; Black 299; crossroads of 263; early Indian 177; European 261; federation of 257, 264; human 28; neo- 177; post-colonial 169; refugee 63; transcontinental 7 difference 9, 37, 50, 52, 85, 91, 113, 123, 148, 199–200, 202–204, 206, 215, 263, 265–267, 274, 289–290; administrator of 52; age 6; class 204, 207, 234; colonial 306; cultural 37, 206, 245, 308; ethnic 37, 204; gender 6; politics of 274; production of 9, 205–206; proliferation

Index of 267; racial 6, 9, 184, 199–200, 290, 305; radical 306; sexual 6 differentiation 185; group 290; mechanisms of 9, 199; political strategy of 204 discursive regimes 214 displacement 4, 7–8, 10, 27–28, 31, 146, 157, 160–162, 204, 214, 219–220, 224, 230, 240–241, 251; dispossessed by 109; forced 2, 10, 12, 89, 160, 217, 224–225, 229, 233–234, 236–237, 251; history of 87; human 3, 7; indigenous 7, 159; internal 214, 218–219, 229; international 10; notion of 30; population 158, 163; recourse to 38; -related vulnerability 219–220; religious 7–8; transnational 9 ecology 123, 129; see also border Ecuador 9, 179, 199–205, 207, 241 Ecuadorian National Strike 200–201 ejidos 16 energy 231, 236–237; conglomerates 230, 235; extraction 230; multi-national 230; projects 234; reform 224, 231, 233; resources 235 equality 9–10, 200, 203, 243; of citizens 311; constitutional guarantee of 243; fight for 205; for the popular 200, 203; political 206; by the popular 200, 203–204 ethnopolitics 169 Euro-American anthropocentrism 174 Europe 7, 11, 17, 19–20, 23, 35, 47, 86–88, 91–93, 99–103, 133, 145, 172–173, 184, 202, 262, 266, 271–274, 277, 279–282, 283, 284–285, 289, 291, 296, 298, 303, 306, 308–309, 311; Catholic 151; Christian 284; continental 91, 146, 153, 271, 274–275, 282; East 11, 91–92, 216, 277; ethnic heterogeneity in 272; forgotten 277; hegemonic 279; Islamism in 308; late twentieth-century 121; migrant crisis in 295; modern 272–273; notion of 274, 279, 282; political imaginary of 303; politics in 303; postcolonial 298; post-Westphalian 282; post-World War 216; present-day 294; refugees in 151, 192; religiously coherent 273; Schengen 304; sociology of 273, 279; South 11, 271, 290; sovereign nation-states in 272; territory of 308; Western 50, 282, 292; xenophobia in 299; see also Caribbean

317

European: Agency for Fundamental Rights Report (2017) 100; authority 297; borders 19, 273, 281, 303; Central Bank 274; civilization 308; coast guard 297; colleges 146; colonial expansion 272; colonial rule 274; colonial world domination 47; colonialism 171, 183, 271; colonies 272; colonized territories 11; Commission 309; Community 274; conjuncture 20; continent 12; countries 100; court of Human Rights 304; cultures 308; discourse 279; dream 297; Economic Community 274–275; economic power 277; empires 19, 262–263; Enlightenment 187; expansion 183; history 11, 271; industrialization 187; landmass 280; laws 294; morals 308; nations 292; non- 271–274, 279, 295; origin 159; Parliament 274, 309; politics 100; population 159; power 279; pre- 177, 187; Reformation 7, 145; satellite launching station 285; slave trade 279; soil 2, 92, 297; southern 290; states 272, 275, 277, 279, 282, 284, 303; Studies 11; transatlantic trade 272; transregional relations 11; tribe 308; Union 11–12, 18, 87–88, 99–101, 271, 273–274, 277, 280–282, 285, 303; values 274, 309; way of life 309; Western 271–272; zone 19; see also diaspora 261 exile 7–9, 12, 86, 92, 131–140, 147–149, 151–153, 257 extractivism 8, 10, 29, 160, 163 extra-territoriality 136 Farmakonisi Case 12, 303–304, 306–307, 310 forced internal displacement 229 Foucault, Michel 8, 45, 62, 101, 213, 244, 291, 295 freedom of movement 4, 17, 23–24 Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) 201 Gandhi, Leela 311 gender 4–6, 37, 70–72, 91, 99–101, 104, 202–204, 259–260, 263, 266–267; cis- 102; disparities 108; identities 99; relations 113; representation 260; struggles 303; theorist 123; trans- 6, 100–103; violence 28, 104, 109–111, 113 genocide 91, 189–191, 272, 295; Maya 183, 189; Nazi 91

318

Index

globalization 1, 4, 12, 27, 34, 50, 53, 58, 103, 163, 169, 172, 176–177, 179, 184, 187, 266, 282, 293, 309 Greece 57, 61, 304 Guatemala 9, 28–29, 107, 109, 111–112, 184, 186–187, 189–192, 217 Harbage Page, Susan 126 Hermanos Mayo May Day “Brothers” 70, 72–73, 75, 80–81, 149 hieleras 108, 183, 191 history 6, 19, 33, 47, 81, 84, 89, 91, 93, 122, 146, 150, 152, 157, 171, 176, 201, 206, 213–216, 228, 236, 243, 259–260, 262–263, 265, 273, 279, 281–282, 296, 304, 310; of the American West 88; annals of 43; biopolitical 212; of borders 94; of class coalitions 207; colonial 271, 294, 297; concepts of 133; of colonialism 124, 308; of cruelty 89, 94; cultural 9, 173; of displacement 87; European 11, 271; human 120; imperial 271, 277; of inequality 206; of injustice 93; Mesoamerican 187; migratory 17, 157; modern 284; national 295; of neoliberalism 236; personal 63; political 90, 201; public 291; of rightlessness 89; secular 174; of slavery 260, 299; of violence 89–90; of war 90, 92; Western 184; world 262 human trafficking 43, 48, 51, 111–112, 114, 299 humanitarianism 3, 10, 22, 217, 242, 249; sexual 99, 103 indigenous: alliances 179; art collective 120; blood 158; children 183; citizens 178; civilizational principles 176; communal-territorial titles 178; communities 8, 89, 122, 169–172, 176, 178, 305, 307; conception 173; cultigen 173; cultural language 172; cultures 3, 8, 163, 177; deterritorializations 8; displacements 7–8; epistemological approach 172; ethnic people 176; ethnoses 171; evolvement 177; groups 162; histories 123, 187; identity 204; intellectuals 184; justice 205; knowledge 124, 128; land rights 126; lands 169; language 158; leaders 205; legal systems 178; lives 305; medicine 120, 122; migrants 158, 169, 175, 192; mobilization 204; movement 53, 200–201, 206; nationalities 201; nations 184; organizations 178, 205;

organized resistance 179; origin 163; peasants 49; people 8–9, 89, 120, 122, 154, 169–180, 187, 192, 201, 205–206, 272, 305; population 9, 128, 158–159, 162, 187, 199, 234; presence 125, 159; primigenial features 206; protesters 204; sectors 169; self-determination 170; semiotic system 122; societies 175–176, 206; sovereignty 178–179; states 174; subjects 183, 187; territorial jurisdiction 178; territories 177; uprising 201 inequality 3, 9, 28, 49, 52, 203, 246; accentuation of 9, 199; by difference 200, 203–204, 206; economic 1, 51, 274; erasing 73; human 120, 125, 129; income 28; naturalization of 2; networks of 27; perpetuation of 69; policies 206 Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) 219, 229 internally displaced persons (IDPs) 212–215, 218–220 Iraq 5, 10, 57–67, 240–241, 245, 249, 251 Kanwar, Amar 120, 126–129 Kracauer, Sigfried 7, 132–133, 135–140 labor: abstract 46; bio- 45; chain 48; cheap 5, 45, 49–50, 289; colonized 48; contractual 45; exploitation of 203, 263; extraction 262; farm 69, 76; feminization of 34; force 24, 43, 46–50, 71; forced 51, 158; global division of 43, 45–46; imperial management of 47; indentured 47, 50; industrial 273; informal 45; internalization of 34; international division of 46; invisible 49; law 234; manual 69, 306; markets 4, 21, 46, 48, 112–113; migrant 21, 24, 50, 289; mobilities 104; movements 4; multiplication of 46; need 27; neoliberal 200; nomadic 45; organization of 44, 49; physical 112; plantation 272; politics of 24; power 43, 46, 48; program 71; racialized 47–48; regimes 46, 48–50; -related illnesses 34; rural 2; shortages of 46, 69; skilled 48; slave 45, 51; social 44; solidarities 258; strikes 285; transnational division of 43, 45, 49–50; undocumented 49; unused 46; wage 176 language of place 172 Leivick, Daniel 125–126 LGBTQI: activism 99, 104; individuals 100; migrant 104; seekers 103 logistics 20–21 long-distance nationalism 257

Index López y López, Antonio 11, 290–292, 294–296 martyrdom 8, 145, 147, 151–154; potential 150 Marx, Karl 4, 24, 46, 171–172, 174–175, 234, 262, 272 masculinity 77, 79, 92; clerical 145; dynamic 151; hyper 230; Jesuit 150– 151; mandate 113–114; religious 148 materiality 1, 12, 105, 123, 134, 310; of borders 5; concrete 310; of migration 7 Mayas 9, 184–185, 188–190, 192; enslaved 188–189; Guatemalan 189, 191 McClennen, Sophia 140 Mediterranean 2, 11, 18–19, 22–23, 33, 36, 105, 173–174, 291–292, 295–299, 311; monumental 291; Southern 298; see also Black Mediterranean memory 5–7, 64, 87, 93, 127, 131, 164; coloniality of 277, 279–280, 285, 293–294; historical 293–294; poetics of 7, 131, 136, 139–140; recuperation 294; refugee 59; visual 291 Mexico 2, 4–6, 8, 23, 29, 31–33, 35, 38, 49, 59–60, 64, 70–71, 73, 79, 81, 91–92, 94, 107, 111–112, 120–122, 124–126, 129, 159, 169–170, 175–176, 178–179, 183, 186–187, 191–192, 224–225, 228– 231, 233–237, 261; drug war 224–227, 230, 233, 235 Mignolo, Walter 124–125, 184 migration crisis 199–200, 202–205 militarization 10, 122, 224–226, 228–229, 231, 233, 235, 237 milpa 173–174, 185–186 Moreno, Lenin 199, 201, 204–205 Nadel, Leonard 5, 69–70, 72–73, 75–81 narco-culture 224 nation 21, 71, 93, 149, 153–155, 179, 224, 241, 246, 257, 259, 264–265, 282, 284, 292, 297, 309; -building 272; Catholic 153; formation 146; ideas of 12; -States 3–4, 32, 51, 53, 79, 105, 171, 176, 178–179, 216, 244, 251, 257–258, 272, 282, 284, 289, 293, 299, 305, 307; translocal 257; unified 246 national security 10, 33, 224–225, 234–235, 237 national strike 200–207 nationalism 3, 11–12, 20–23, 32, 47, 150, 177, 242, 250, 257 neoliberal policy 10, 233–234

319

neoliberalism 12, 20–21, 23, 50–52, 100, 103, 200, 207, 236, 305–306 Nonlife 305 The Origins of Totalitarianism 91 paramilitarism 233, 237 pedagogy of cruelty 114 Peri Rossi, Cristina 7, 131–140 photography 3, 69, 72, 75, 78 poetics 134, 260, 265, 311; community 303; of depropriation 65; of exile 132; of found language 65; of relationality 260; see also memory policies of multiethnicity 179 politics of reception 99–100 polycentric cosmologies 174 polyculture 173–174 popular: bloc 200–201, 204, 206; classes 77; coalitions 200; conception 121; discourse 229; equality 200, 203–204, 206; forces 206; resistance 4; sectors 203; sensitivity 28; sovereignty 204; subjects 199 populism 199, 202–204; anti-immigrant 240; conception of 204; progressive 199; xenophobic 47 “populist leaders” conspiracy 205 postcommodity 120–123, 125, 129 Povinelli, Elizabeth 305–306 protest 10, 59, 69, 102, 127–128, 191, 201, 204–206, 241, 246–249, 293 Puerto Rico 11, 257–259, 285 queer asylum seekers 99, 101, 103 race 4–6, 9–11, 70, 77, 79, 184, 187, 202–204, 216, 264, 289–291, 295, 298–299, 303, 305, 307; analysis of 289; –capitalism articulation 207; concept of 187; divine 147; inferior 37; intersection of 184; studies 105; theory 290; visuality of 290, 295 racialization 2, 12, 37–38, 47, 184, 205, 207, 289–290, 307 racism 9, 20, 29, 33, 37, 43, 47, 52, 188, 199, 207, 290–291, 295, 299, 305, 308 Raft of Lampedusa 11–12, 296–299 razor wire see barbed wire refugee 1, 12, 20–22, 53, 57, 62–64, 87, 92, 99, 101, 104, 147, 149, 151, 153, 190, 192, 213, 215–217, 219, 237, 240–251, 266, 280, 285, 289, 303–311; camp 61, 90–91, 190, 241, 244, 249, 251; Catholic 7, 145–146, 152; child

320

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63; confessional 146; crisis 192, 304, 307, 309; culture 245; deportee-as65; documents 241; economic 160; employability 242; English 151; experiences 70; futurity 58–59; gratitude 57–58, 63; memory 59; movement 216; offshore camps 2; Palestinian 10; patriot 63, 65–66; placement 242; political 70; protection of 216; Protestant 145; queer 99–100, 104; reception centre 64; religious 145, 147, 149; resettled 62–63; shelters 309; status 99, 242, 251, 293, 307; temporalities 57, 63; war 63, 240–241 religion 8, 61, 145–146, 149–150, 153, 175, 216, 289, 309; Catholic 159; syncretic 277 Religious migration 7, 146 removal 110, 248, 292, 294; execution of 60; orders 57, 59–60; papers 58; people 169; priority 59; relief from 58 Repellent Fence 120–123, 125–126 resilience 108, 113 The “right to have rights” 89, 91, 94 rogue 214, 230, 306–307, 309; Arab 306, 308; state 306 sex work 100–104; community 102; migrant 99, 101; regulation of 102; street 103; transgender 6, 100 sexual humanitarianism 99, 103 Smith, Shawn Michelle 71–73, 75 Society of Jesus 150–151, 153–154 sovereignty 1, 3, 12, 33, 48, 169–170, 178, 184, 192, 215, 234, 282, 284–285, 289, 306; concept of 32; democratic 308; epistemological 174; indigenous 178–179; intellectual 171; national 237; notion of 217, 282; political 51, 53; popular 204; rights to 8; see also State Spivak, Gayatri 303, 307 State: agencies 63, 219; anomie 50; appropriation 10; -based citizenship 78; betrayal 79; borders 48, 230–231; -building projects 174; bureaucracy 221; centrality of the 3; city- 186; colonial 171, 207; continuous liminal 237; control 73; courts 248; democratic welfare 309; of divinity 164; empire284; -enforced domestic racial hierarchy 71; of extraterritoriality 138; failure 219, 225; government 127; -hood 282, 284; imperial 207, 263; indigenous

174; institutions 52; interests of the 10; intervention 110; legislation 178; -lessness 53, 86, 91, 153, 241; liberal 47; militarized 234, 236; of mind 135; modern 53; modernizing 129; nascent 265; nation- 3–4, 32, 51, 53, 79, 105, 171, 176, 178–179, 216, 244, 251, 257–258, 264, 272, 282, 284, 289, 293, 299, 305–307; neoliberal 244; omission 99; owned 234; parallel 233–234; persecution 100; police 226–228; policies 32; politics 32; power of the 33, 73; precolonial 171; protection 53; protectionist 234; protective 179; reforms 169; -regulated formal economy 49; repression 3, 146; -responsibility 221; revolutionary 71; role of the 3; of self-effacement 138; sovereign 47, 61, 93, 217, 282, 303, 306; structures 234, 282, 284; terror 59; violence 10, 226, 235, 237, 299; welfare 169, 179; see also exile, rogue subaltern 38, 128, 184–185, 187, 307, 310; bodies 259; condition 206; cosmopolitanism 11, 267; modernities 259, 264; social sectors 52; struggles 263; subjects 191 subjectivity 4, 7, 22, 44, 54, 75, 266, 290; agentive 73; heterogeneous 54; sexual 101; transmigrant 54 survivance 303, 305 systemic violence 9, 108–109, 193 temporality 58, 63, 131, 134–137, 140, 249 territorial basis 170 trans-agency 99 transculturation 11, 257, 259–261, 264, 267 translocal 4, 9, 27, 30, 257–259, 261, 264, 266 transnational migration and diaspora 176 transnationalism 4, 54, 151, 155, 177, 298 UNHCR 111, 213, 216–217, 241–249, 251 Venezuela 9, 28, 107, 176, 199–202, 204–205, 250, 280 Venezuelan migration 199–200, 202 xenophobia 43, 47, 199–200, 202, 205, 295, 299 Žižek, Slavoj 52