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 vari-
ety 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 free-
dom 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, geogra-
phy, 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 the-
ory, 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 ix
List of contributors x

Introduction 1
MABEL MORAÑA

PART I
Migration, (trans)borders, and the freedom of movement 15

1 Proliferating borders in the battlefield of migration: Rethinking

freedom of movement 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 Transmigrants as embodiment of biocapitalism 43

ABRIL TRIGO

4 Refuge and deportation: The future as property in the border regime 57

ANGELA NAIMOU
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 97

7 Mobile reorientations: Trans-agency and the queering of the Italian

politics of migrant reception in Henrique Goldman’s Princesa 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 157
JOSÉ ANTONIO MAZZOTTI
 Contents vii
13 Language of space: Politics of indigenous people removal and the
ethnopolitics of resistance: The post-colonial diaspora 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 271

MANUELA BOATCĂ
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 Braceros being fumigated with DDT at US border 70

5.2 Aspiring braceros await selection, Mexico City 74
5.3 Wife/mother hugging husband/son as he goes off on the bracero
journey 74
5.4 Husbands/sons and wives/mothers saying good-bye as men head
off to the United States 75
5.5 Official scrutinizes aspiring bracero’s hands 76
5.6 Official checks future braceros for indications of physical
weakness. Leonard Nadel, 1956 77
6.1 Clément Moreau, “An der Grenze” 85
6.2 Clément Moreau “Ohne Titel” 86
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 military-style uniforms
attributed to the group 227
17.2 Map of alleged “influence” of “Los Zetas” 231
17.3 Official 2016 map of government extractive infrastructure of
natural gas 232
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” 236
20.1 EU’s colonies on Euro banknotes 275
20.2 Map of EU overseas countries and territories and outermost
regions 2015 276
20.3 Map of the Caribbean with its European and U.S.-American
colonial possessions 278
20.4 Anguilla’s European borders 281
20.5 Map of Europe with current Western Borders in the South
America and the Caribbean 283
21.1 Diallo protest at the plaza 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 dis-
placed 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 expe-
riences 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 com-
mons. 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: chal-
lenges 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 publica-
tions: 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 dis-
courses 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 chil-
ena 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 socio-
historical 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 pub-
lished 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 Anim-
Addo 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 elec-
tronic 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 numer-
ous essays on gender and religious life, and the editor of two collected vol-
umes, 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 sociol-
ogy 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 part-
nerships, African Diaspora and Latino Studies, sociology of culture and cul-
tural 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 World-
Cities 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 Contributors
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 com-
plete 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 his-
panoamericanas (Pittsburgh, 2000), “Discurso en Loor de la Poesía” Estudio
y edición, by Antonio Cornejo Polar (Berkeley, CA, 2000), Renacimiento mes-
tizo: 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 recog-
nized 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 sci-
ences 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 xv
is an active participant in the “post-workerist” debates and one of the found-
ers 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 con-
dizione 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 eth-
nography, forced transnational migration, diaspora, and gendered and racial-
ized 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 immi-
grant 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
xvi Contributors
and the Journal of Borderlands Studies. Ila’s work focuses on the idea of bor-
ders as generative cultural and geopolitical sites, as well as zones that compli-
cate 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 pro-
cess 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, histo-
ria 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 lati-
noamericanos (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 inter-
nationally 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 con-
tribution 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 trajec-
tory. 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
 Contributors xvii
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 lan-
guage 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 etnopo-
lítico 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 Apffel-
Marglin 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 memo-
ria (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 moder-
nity 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 lati-
noamericana 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 dispues-
tas: 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 con-
ceptually, the pervasive encounters between the massive fluxes of transnational
migrants and the material and intangible obstacles imposed as proliferating dis-
positifs 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, contesta-
tion, 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 move-
ment, 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 cen-
tury are certainly disputing the title. The strengthening of national borders, as well
as the effects of dehumanizing migratory laws, border regulations, and harass-
ment of so-called irregular migrants, has become, since the 1990s, an increasingly
Kafkaesque reality. On both land and sea, border fortifications, wire fences, elec-
tronic 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
2 Mabel Moraña
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 empha-
sizing 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 out-
comes, 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 liv-
ing 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 mini-
mal 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 begin-
ning 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 cross-
ings, 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 sur-
pass previous scenarios and require original approaches.
Philosophy is recognized as one of the most important fields for the under-
standing of migratory issues, since it constitutes a domain that allows for in-depth
reflections and debates on topics such as solidarity, tolerance, identity, and alter-
ity, 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 eco-
nomics 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 disciplin-
ing and control of populations around the world.
The progressive weakening of nation-States, the strengthening of entrepre-
neurial transnationalized business, the proliferation of supranational institu-
tions, 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 ideo-
logical configuration of the civil entity – the citizen – defined as the subject of
modern politics, today that motto alludes to two distinguishable, if not antago-
nistic 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 rel-
evance 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 under-
standing of the ways in which power operates globally, under the regimes imposed
by late capitalism and biopolitical domination. It soon became evident that cur-
rent 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 commu-
nity, human rights, nationalism, and cosmopolitism), other categories open new
4 Mabel Moraña
avenues for the understanding of massive mobilizations and their social and polit-
ical effects (e.g., transnationalism, global citizenship, transmigration, biocapital-
ism, displacement, extraterritoriality, and infrapolitics). A change of vocabulary,
when substantiated by innovative analysis, indicates the modification of perspec-
tives 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 configura-
tion 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, biopoli-
tics, 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 struc-
tures 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 nec-
ropolitical 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 bor-
der studies, in Chapter 2 provides a critical and theoretical approach to the analy-
sis 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, par-
ticularly 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 classifi-
cation, 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 hybrid-
izations 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 theo-
retical discussion of the effects of biocapitalism in the globalized world, propos-
ing 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 con-
tinuous reproduction of capital. Expanding the notion of biopolitics, biocapital-
ism 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 coor-
dinates: “Deportation can mean transformative loss, transformed future, a disrup-
tion 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 photo-
journalist 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 subjectivi-
ties (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
6 Mabel Moraña
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 dehuman-
izes 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 ana-
lyzes Henrique Goldman’s Princesa (2001), a filmic adaptation of the testimo-
nial 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 differ-
ential inclusion, the conditions related to sexuality imposed on asylum-seekers
in different countries, and the specific situation of subjects with alternative sexu-
alities, who become the target of particular forms of biopolitical discrimination
and invisibilization. This chapter alerts us about zones of discrimination, invis-
ibility, 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 accom-
pany 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 under-
stood 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, mem-
ory, 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 depic-
tion 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 tech-
nological 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 protago-
nists 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, dem-
onstrating 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,
8 Mabel Moraña
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 persecu-
tion, 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 connec-
tion 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 intol-
erance 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 communi-
ties 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 devastat-
ing 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 exam-
ple 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 terri-
torial 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 aban-
donment” (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 devas-
tating 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 cor-
rected to improve the situation), and “catastrophe” (where uncontrollable dam-
ages 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 auton-
omy … they fight to prevent their extinction. … The colony is now everywhere.”
Part V, “Translocalities in Latin America,” offers a range of studies that con-
centrate 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 impedi-
ments for the achievement of democratization and equality originated in colonial-
ism 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 inter-
nal and transnational displacements play a key role.
In Chapter 15, Jorge Daniel Vásquez effectively connects migration and rac-
ism, 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 discrimi-
nation 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 accen-
tuation of inequality. Social injustice, dehumanization, and devastation of the
10 Mabel Moraña
environment expose the necropolitical logic of capitalism, as well as its articula-
tion with race and labor, both at central and peripheral levels.
Also in the direction of an economic, political, and ideological critique of capi-
talism, Juan Ricardo Aparicio analyzes in Chapter 16 the situation of the inter-
nally 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 politi-
cal 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 tak-
ing 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 narco-
violence, 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 individu-
als 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 move-
ments 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 “sub-
altern cosmopolitanism,” decoloniality, and trans-Americanism having func-
tioned as “imperial frontier, planetary borderland [and] worldly crossroads,”
the Caribbean represents “the first site of colonial modernity, as such constitu-
tive of western capitalist modernity, primary referent for primitive accumula-
tion, chattel slavery, conquest and colonization.”
In Chapter 20, Manuela Boatcǎ makes a very necessary correction in the direc-
tion of European Studies, an area of inquiry that has traditionally neglected certain
continental regions (East and South Europe), as well as European colonized ter-
ritories 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 transre-
gional 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 histo-
riographical and political redefinitions and for the foundation of a decolonial per-
spective 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 sugges-
tive 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
12 Mabel Moraña
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 com-
pelling 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 gath-
ered 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 per-
meate 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 counternarra-
tive 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 sub-
sumed in the discourse of others. This critical piece leaves us with the responsi-
bility 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 soci-
ety, sovereignty, nationalism, citizenship, and the like. For these reasons, mas-
sive 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 conscious-
ness. 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
1 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 co-
edited 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 prolifera-
tion 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 bor-
ders, 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 solid-
ity of a wall, which is only one possible instantiation of the border, borders are
indeed quite elusive formations. Their multiple components, legal and geograph-
ical, 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
18 Sandro Mezzadra
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 vari-
able economy of visibility and invisibility (see Balibar, “Uprisings”). Even more
importantly, borders are constitutively contested institutions and fields of strug-
gle; 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 manifes-
tations, 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 mis-
leading 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 exist-
ing “at the edge of territory, marking the point where it ends” – “have been trans-
ported 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 instal-
lation 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 pro-
ject “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 bor-
ders 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 politi-
cally 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 impli-
cations 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 supra-
national 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 move-
ment of people”) have been selectively closed from time to time. Border fences
and walls proliferate across the so-called Balkan route, where hundreds of thou-
sands 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, rang-
ing 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 pre-
dicament 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.
20 Sandro Mezzadra
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 refu-
gees 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, authori-
tarianism, 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 con-
juncture 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 con-
temporary operations of capital. Borrowing the terms employed by world system
theory (see Arrighi), we could even say that we are confronted today with pro-
found 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 com-
pletely 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 migra-
tion. Over the last couple of decades, we have been critically investigating the bor-
der and migration regime connected with neoliberalism (see Hess and Kasparek).
There has always been a tension within that regime between different logics, dis-
courses, 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 tumultu-
ous 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-the-
point 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-coor-
dinated 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 heteroge-
neous 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 differ-
ent parts of the world, what I was calling before the “biopolitical” component has
22 Sandro Mezzadra
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 rea-
son” 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 implica-
tions 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 contem-
porary 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, “necropoli-
tics,” 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 migra-
tion that challenges the politics of control and composes a battlefield that repro-
duces 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 effec-
tively 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 migra-
tion; 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-sig-
nify 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 coali-
tions capable of the struggle against the combination of authoritarianism, nation-
alism, 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 depar-
ture 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 free-
dom 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 discuss-
ing 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 influ-
ential work of Joseph Carens is a good instance of that. Today, we are witness-
ing 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 empha-
size 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
24 Sandro Mezzadra
the spatiality of freedom of movement, which necessarily becomes multi-scalar.
While the national level remains important, the struggle for freedom of move-
ment has clearly transnational moments (also considering the transnationalization
of border control), while cities become strategic sites of action and experimenta-
tion, 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 neo-
liberal 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 migra-
tion, 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 work-
ers. 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 “autochtho-
nous” 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 con-
cerns 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 free-
dom 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
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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
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Balibar, Étienne. 2007. “Uprisings in the Banlieues.” Constellations 14 (1): 47–71.
Benton, Lauren. 2010. A Search for Sovereignty. Cambridge: Cambridge University
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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/
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Pacific and on Refugee Bodies.” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 24 (3):
290–306.
26 Sandro Mezzadra
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.
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East Asia.” South Atlantic Quarterly 111 (4): 721–727.
2 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 con-
ditions of violence, thus accentuating the vulnerability of migrant populations.
Such defenselessness results from the implementation of the devastating strate-
gies of neoliberal necropolitics in times of late capitalism, which turn the migra-
tory 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, deep-
ens 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 individu-
als 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 pro-
cess 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 migra-
tory 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
28 José Manuel Valenzuela Arce
who live with less than two dollars a day, and of the miserable who hardly sur-
vive 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 condi-
tions trigger displacement, forced migration, escapes, and forced flirtations with
death, exposing people to aggression and varied forms of violence, such as rac-
ist and gender violence, supremacists, homophobic, aporophobic, institutional, or
instrumental violence.
Eight out of ten countries in the world with the highest indexes of income ine-
quality 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 mul-
titudes 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 chal-
lenges and risks. The so-called North Central American Triangle includes three
small countries that together hardly reach 32 million people: El Salvador (popula-
tion 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 chil-
dren 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 inter-
national 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 disposses-
sion, which combines the devastation of natural resources, economic and social
extractivism, but also the effects of violence related to armed struggles, social con-
flicts, repression, external interventions, violation of human rights, loss of citizen-
ship, 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 thou-
sands 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 organ-
ized crime. They act with intense articulation with institutional actors, establish-
ing 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 hap-
pened in Mexico since the rule of Felipe Calderón in December 2006, and contin-
ued 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 mem-
bers 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
30 José Manuel Valenzuela Arce
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 ear-
lier 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 unac-
ceptable 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 cul-
tural systems of social classification. Borders are socially and historically con-
structed, something that allows us to recognize that there “natural” borders do not
exist. All borders refer to historically, socially, and culturally constructed delimi-
tations. 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 transbor-
der 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 displace-
ment, 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 capi-
talism 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, connec-
tive, interstitial conditions, injunctive conditions, generative conditions, perform-
ative-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 rela-
tions 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 ana-
lytical 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 pro-
cesses of proximity, vicinity, intense and daily interaction, and livability. In the
Mexico-US border, in addition to family relations and friendships, intense eco-
nomic, 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 condi-
tion. 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
32 José Manuel Valenzuela Arce
connective dimension, as it establishes new forms of coexistence, also gener-
ates strategies and processes of simultaneity through which persons can inter-
act 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 expe-
riences of coexistence and interaction, and that possess a dimension that is dif-
ferent 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 behavio-
ral 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 pro-
cesses, 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 dimen-
sion of the State, where the nation-State and nationalism have different expressive
forms in which we can distinguish self-determinist, legitimating, popular, impe-
rial, 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 deliri-
ous 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 repres-
sion, 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 threat-
ening 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
34 José Manuel Valenzuela Arce
condition, or the condition that generates the border, is constructed through pro-
cesses of cultural appropriation, which means, through the incorporation of cul-
tural 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 pro-
cesses of hybridization, where sociocultural innovation results from the intense
relationship between different cultures, with its processes of appropriation, rec-
reation, resistance, and conflict. The generative condition implies innovation, and
this innovation refers to the processes of construction of new meanings and sig-
nificance of social and cultural border processes. This refers not only to the emer-
gence 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 repro-
duced 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 industrializa-
tion 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, incre-
ment 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 consumer-
ism through Walmart, Costco, and many other transnational chains standard-
ize 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 con-
dition 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 expan-
sion 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 differ-
ent 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 con-
structs clicas, stronger forms enclosed in their own neighborhoods, that confer
significance to space through placazos and murals, elements that define and iden-
tify 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 chal-
lenges 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 lit-
erature 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 implementa-
tion of a series of strategies that utilize power, submission, violence, humiliation,
36 José Manuel Valenzuela Arce
and degradation. Some examples that illustrate this biopolitical condition are the
doping and imprisonment of migrant children during Donald Trump’s govern-
ment, 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 addi-
tion 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 condi-
tions 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 succeed-
ing 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 unde-
sirable from supremacist perspectives that have gained a presence in the United
States, where they allow identifying countries whose peoples or residents are con-
sidered 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 associ-
ated 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 oper-
ate through frameworks organized from fundamentalist perspectives, supremacist
orders, and structured positions that block the crossing of certain groups, previ-
ously 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 first-
hand 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 condi-
tion 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, recog-
nizing 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 dis-
placements, migration, and migratory caravans as a strategy oriented to the con-
quest 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.

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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 move-
ments 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 par-
ticular 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 predict-
able 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, feed-
ing 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 inter-
national 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 flex-
ible 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 com-
modity 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 revo-
lution 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, how-
ever, 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 Fordist-
Taylorist organization of labor focused on production to the flexible and reticu-
lated managing of labor and consumption at all moments of the economic cycle,
with particular emphasis on the omnivorous subsumption of labor time and lei-
sure 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, soci-
ality, 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, trans-
national 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 cru-
cial – 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, struc-
tural 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 interna-
tional 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 heteroge-
neity 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 artifi-
cial, 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 distribu-
tion 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 indiffer-

ence 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 con-
crete 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, inde-
pendent 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 slav-
ery, and massive migrations from Europe and later from China and India, under
convict or indentured labor systems, of people ejected by land enclosures, starva-
tion, 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 per-
manence 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, pre-
dictable corollaries to the devastating effects of the biocapitalist regime of accu-
mulation, 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 inter-
national 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, govern-
ance 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 deten-
tion 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 ille-
gal 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 politi-
cal construction that supports the entire global labor chain. This is why trans-
national 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, demo-
graphic, 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 combina-
tion 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 glo-
bocentrismo”), 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 continu-
ance of active transnational connections between homeland and the host country
instead of assimilation – in other words, they’ve gained in mobility and independ-
ence (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 transna-
tional division of labor. David Bacon convincingly demonstrates the correlation
between the effects of the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) in Mexico and the subse-
quent 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 sec-
tors of the agricultural and food industries rest. This includes a variety of activi-
ties, from picking fruits and vegetables to the dairy and meat-packing plants, not
to mention construction, gardening, and the vast and amorphous field of hospital-
ity services. In other words, transnational migration – documented or undocu-
mented, 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 biopoliti-
cal 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 transmi-
grants, 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 peas-
ants coming from Mexico, Solimano points out that Latin American migration is
mainly composed of women and young people, mostly with a medium-high edu-
cation 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 suf-
focated 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 consen-
sus – 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 ille-
gal, 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 employ-
ment to 130 million people). Additionally, it subsidizes costs of the formal sector,
pushing wages down and guaranteeing an abundant reserve army, while provid-
ing services and products at a lower cost and without contractual responsibili-
ties 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 nation-
alities 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 men-
tioned above do? After all, the boundaries between informality, illegality, and
flexibility are, at least, fluid. How to distinguish between atypical, transitory, flex-
ible, 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 success-
ful in Thailand and Costa Rica, and prostitution networks that provide Western
Europe with young Slavs or Brazilians? What is the difference between a sweat-
shop 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 flex-
ible organization in a network that replicates the workings of transnational cor-
porations: 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 (Scheper-
Hugues “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 pov-
erty, 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 mil-
lions 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 – includ-
ing 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 man-
aging 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 citizen-
ship 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 con-
taining 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 democ-
racy 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 citi-
zenship 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 hedon-
istic, 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 free-
dom and releases individuals from their social and even political responsibili-
ties 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 cos-
mopolitan 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 circum-
stances (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 some-
thing 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 repatri-
ated. These noncitizens often have nationalities of origin, but, inasmuch as
they prefer not to benefit from their own States’ protection, they find them-
selves, 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 there-
then, the transmigrant lives on shaping a fragmented and heterogeneous sub-
jectivity, unable to synthesize his living experiences without suffering great
losses (Trigo Memorias migrantes). Migrancy, in this sense, configures a cul-
tural 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 trans-
nacionales: migraciones, transmigraciones y diásporas” and “El espacio transnacional
de la experiencia migrante.”

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1979 [1976].
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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.
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University Press, 1998.
Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity, 2000.
Bauman, Zygmunt. Society under Siege. London: Polity, 2002.
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and Mexico”. Georgetown Immigration Law Journal 24 (2010): 565–583.
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Fumagalli, Andrea. “Twenty The Theses on Contemporary Capitalism (Cognitive
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Immigrants and Transnational Cultures (Transnationalism). London: Routledge, 2002.
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University Press, 2000.
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Politic. Markets in Biology Bodies and Information. NACLA Report on the Americas
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Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2003.
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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 tem-
poralities 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 dis-
cuss 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 temporali-
ties,” 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 nar-
rative 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 con-
sistently 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 iden-
tification 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 “recalci-
trant” 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 fac-
tions 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 thor-
oughly 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 com-
mon 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 post-
ers featuring images of the crucifix, victims of ISIS (aka Da’esh), words ask-
ing 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 nonciti-
zens 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 keep-
ing 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 cor-
pus 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 material-
ize, 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 theoreti-
cal 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 persecu-
tion 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 subse-
quent dissenting opinion also agreed that the petitioners presented credible evi-
dence 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 result-
ing. Instead, the majority faults Petitioners for failing to file motions to reo-
pen 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 wor-
ried 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 some-
thing 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 refu-
gee 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 post-
2001 liberal empire was organized by the structure of debt, in which the reset-
tled 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, trans-
forms 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 tar-
gets 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 sov-
ereign authority and national purity even as it is an act that is thoroughly interna-
tional 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 nation-
ality 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 chal-
lenges to state and transnational cruelty. Blasim’s writings do not make a humani-
tarian 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 phantasma-
goric 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, eco-
logical, 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 disposses-
sion 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 liter-
ary system itself, “The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes” opens a way out of refu-
gee 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 writ-
ing, nonfiction or cross-genre writing, poetics of found language, and writing out-
side the novel form. Blasim provides his own style of unprivileged and privileged
forms: he publishes the Arabic stories online, releasing his writing from censor-
ship 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 writ-
ing 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 circu-
late 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, dys-
topia, 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 real-
ism,” 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 lan-
guage 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 engi-
neer 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 main-
tain 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 out-
landish 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 Carlos-
Salim’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 mar-
ket. 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.

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umich.org/en/hamama-v-adducci-secret-documents-released
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.com/2228632/videos/10111835012432033/
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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
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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 canis-
ter 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 left-
leaning 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, leg-
ibility, 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 expropria-
tion,” 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
70 Deborah Cohen

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 condi-
tions 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 con-
sumed by the middle class (Mraz 1996, np.). They made “workers’ art” focused
on “uncovering the relations within the [photographic] frame” and acknowledg-
ing they had been “‘emigrants for political reasons and [braceros] … [for] hun-
ger’” (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 pho-
tos 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 brace-
ros 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 repres-
sive 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 com-
municate not just anger or resistance, but their range of inner life as they, as indi-
viduals, 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, democ-
racy abroad. Mexico, in contrast, was a young revolutionary state; its rhetoric
proclaimed protection and advocacy for all citizens. While much has been writ-
ten 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 … represent-
atives of Mexico in the U.S. Be an example of honesty and show what good
72 Deborah Cohen
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 author-
ity” 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 communi-
cate 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 insist-
ing 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 suffer-
ing 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 “pro-
cess 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 mat-
ter 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 relation-
ship, 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 can-
not erase inequality, it can trouble oppression that might otherwise seem intracta-
ble” (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 posi-
tioned 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 possi-
bility of maintaining families – braceros’ goal for the journey – at least partially
negated the boredom and hassles.
74 Deborah Cohen

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 smil-
ing. Media scholar Christina Kotchemidova contends that smiling for the camera
is a learned behavior, one which, for the United States, “Kodak played a leader-
ship 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 self-
possession 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 – posi-
tion. 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 win-
dow 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.
76 Deborah Cohen
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 bread-
winners, 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 cal-
luses 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. Smith-
sonian Institution. Permission NMAH 2004.0138.11.39.
 At the border of sight 77

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 physi-
cal 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 bra-
ceros 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
78 Deborah Cohen
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, bra-
ceros spent much time there. Several braceros learned and practiced their craft
as barber or shoe repairer. While American studies scholar Nicole Guidotti-
Hernández reads these photos as a “lack of idleness” (276), they are also a win-
dow 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 sus-
pend 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 citizen-
ship 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 reli-

ance 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 privi-
leges 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 preemi-
nent, 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 pro-
gram 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 pres-
sured 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 social-
izing 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’ accu-
sations 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 rheto-
ric 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 return-
ing 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:
80 Deborah Cohen
It is shameful that, upon arrival in Mexican territory, these [men] are trans-
ported in freight trains, piled high as if they were beasts. And what is worse,
so that the [men] enter in an orderly fashion, they are beaten with metal sticks.
(Cohen, 178, 181)

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 supervi-
sion – 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 pre-
sent 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 con-
vey 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 remi-
niscent 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 grand-
son 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 relation-
ship, 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 mate-
rial? 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 rela-
tionship 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
82 Deborah Cohen
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=most-
popular

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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.
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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-us-
agricultural-workforce
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25, 1960. https://www.cbsnews.com/video/1960-harvest-of-shame/
Nadel, Leonard. “Two Worlds.” Pageant (1957): 143.
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Photography’s Other Histories. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.
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August 3, 2017. https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/how-we-should-re
spond-to-photographs-of-suffering?verso=true
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University Press, 2013.
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Program,”Radical History Review 132 (2018): 126–143. doi:10.1215/01636545-6942453
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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 his-
tories: barbed wire is one of such things. This device has not only made (and con-
tinues 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 cul-
tures 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 German-
born 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 pos-
session 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,”
 Barbed wire 85

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 idyllic-
looing 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 ren-
ditions; 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
86 Tabea Linhard

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 enti-
tled “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 publica-
tions, 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 pro-
cess of dehumanization, the series also includes a narrative based on the biogra-
phy 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
 Barbed wire 87
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 charac-
ter’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 … some-
thing 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 dis-
placement 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 necessar-
ily 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 for-
tifying 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 prac-
tices. 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 barb-
wire” according to Merriam Webster is a “thing” that together with colonial enter-
prises 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
 Barbed wire 89
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 econom-
ically), 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 adop-
tion of the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” in 1948) and later in The
Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Arendt addresses what happens when mem-
bers 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
90 Tabea Linhard
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 imperi-
alistic, colonizing fatherland.” Díaz Fernández accomplishes this in a subtle man-
ner “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 avail-
able 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
 Barbed wire 91
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 differ-
ent 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 his-
tory 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, argu-
ing 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
92 Tabea Linhard
Africa” (3). In recent years, more nuanced implications of these historical connec-
tions, 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 after-
math 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 “alam-
brada” (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
 Barbed wire 93
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 cross-
ings do not focus so much on the ways in which barbed wire frames the land-
scapes, 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 jour-
ney 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 scream-
ing 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 suc-
ceeds 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 asy-
lums such as the one in Canton Insane Asylum for American Indians, South
94 Tabea Linhard
Dakota that housed native Americans, the questions of security comes into
play as much as the state’s sovereignty over its population.
(486)

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 institu-
tions 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 sus-
pended lengths of barbed wire” invites viewers to consider how the constant pres-
ence 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 privati-
zation 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 refer-
ence 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.”
 Barbed wire 95
9 Ambassador Tomáš Boček, Special Representative of the Secretary General on migra-
tion 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 totalitari-
anism 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

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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.
96 Tabea Linhard
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
7 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 persecu-
tion 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 reclaim-
ing 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 inter-
ventions, 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-abo-
listionist 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, socio-
economic, and intersubjective dynamics” (Mai 3) of migrants, and especially the
group of migrant sex workers. Mai also criticizes the way in which sexual human-
itarianism functions in cinematic representation where a wave of “new global
100 Elena Dalla Torre
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 leav-
ing 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 humanitar-
ian frame of some migrant cinema. Instead, he focused on the complexity of
Fernanda’s borderscape and the border struggles that she experienced at the inter-
section 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, differ-
ential 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 regula-
tions 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, black-
mail, 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 indi-
viduals 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 pro-
cedures 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 “pro-
cesses of biomolecular (pharmaco) and semio-technical (pornographic) govern-
ment 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 pharmacopor-
nographic 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 embod-
ies, to some extent, the figure of the “maes/madrinhas,” who see themselves as the
102 Elena Dalla Torre
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 contigu-
ous yet separate spaces that Fernanda navigates, especially after meeting Gianni
(Cesare Bocci), an Italian man recently separated from his wife. Unlike other cli-
ents, 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 psychia-
trist – 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 hetero-
centric, 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 vis-
à-vis the Italian family and the domestic space – the director critically engages the
regime of hetero-centric compliance to which queer migrants – and here transgen-
der 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 work-
ers 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 schol-
arship 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
104 Elena Dalla Torre
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 recep-
tion 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 recep-
tion 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 prac-
tice 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 individu-
als 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 govern-
ance and of autonomous infrastructures, which Mezzadra references as “ciudades
 Mobile reorientations 105
refugio” in an interview to the Revista Contexto y Acción (2018). Like autono-
mous 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 compos-
ing the space, time and materiality of the social itself” (Mezzadra and Neilson 73).
Border-crossing has over the years represented a preoccupying image for gov-
ernments 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 reorgani-
zation 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 difend-
erli 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.
106 Elena Dalla Torre
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 pop-
ulation for the benefit of global capital. During the twenty-first century, the tor-
turous 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 mobi-
lization 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 sec-
tor 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 inter-
nal 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 rep-
resented 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 reunifica-
tion 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 com-
panies, 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 obsta-
cles, 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 necessar-
ily 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 con-
tributing 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 incor-
porating 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 struc-
tural 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 per-
sistence and resilience when they start their life in the United States as undocu-
mented 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-seek-
ers, they are labeled as “illegals” and criminalized. Many are arrested in deten-
tion 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 displace-
ment, but also stripped of dignity, dehumanized, and subjected to constant shame,
fear, and uncertainty about their futures. However, even though their migrant con-
dition 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 peri-
ods 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 estab-
lished 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 sta-
tistics from the Pew Research Center, the Migration Policy Institute, the United
Nations, and the World Bank. Other materials used for this study include anthro-
pological 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 viola-
tions 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 eco-
nomic 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 vio-
lence,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 tri-
pled. 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 undocu-
mented 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 insist-
ently 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 look-
ing 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 undocu-
mented 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 domes-
tic 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 mil-
lion 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 busi-
nesses, 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 particu-
lar 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 pres-
sure 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 com-
pany, 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 inter-
viewed 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 agri-
business 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 resi-
dents. These three elements offer them the little extra power to abuse women and
reproduce the unequal gender relations fostered in their own countries. The pos-
sibilities of reporting these cases or denouncing the abusers are virtually impos-
sible 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 investiga-
tions 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 organ-
ized 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 con-
front, 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, espe-
cially in relation to hiring and control of labor crews. Big companies do not hire
their workers directly anymore; they outsource their hiring processes, subcon-
tracting 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 tri-
umphs, the structural adjustment programs, which endorse the global biocapital-
ist 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 femin-
ized. 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 mate-
rial 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 harm-
ing 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 low-
intensity 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 man-
date,” 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 chil-
dren would care if they become undocumented and overexploited in the United
States, where at least they could find a job, even though under dreadful condi-
tions? 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 real-
ize 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 assis-
tance 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 character-
istics, 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 urban-
ized, 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 repre-
sentative 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/.

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7ZnDSPBQ
9 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 account-
ing for the human capacity for destruction. At the same time, such considera-
tions 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 migra-
tion 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 non-
human 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 iconog-
raphy – 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 pho-
tograph, 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 ver-
sion 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 undoc-
umented 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 symbol-
ism 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 mar-
ginalized human voices in ways that prioritize objecthood and foreground discus-
sions 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
122 Ila Nicole Sheren
“no-man’s land.” Such rhetoric imagines the borderlands as previously unoc-
cupied, 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 photo-
shopped 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 institut-
ing 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 sym-
bolism. That interconnectedness emphasized by the artists undergirds not only the
political activism inherent to the border discourse but also the modern environ-
mental 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, rerout-
ing 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 border-
as-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 longstand-
ing human communities, but also divides ecological niches. “Border,” then, is a
touchpoint of what physicist and gender theorist Karen Barad terms “entangle-
ment” – 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 interac-
tion can take into account many actors: organic and inorganic (or some combina-
tion thereof), biotic and abiotic, human and nonhuman alike. With the publication
of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 and the birth of modern environmental-
ism 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 biologi-
cal 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
124 Ila Nicole Sheren
according to their own internal logic. In the logic of any given center, then, bor-
ders require maintenance, patrol, walls, and fences: a militarized guard. The bor-
der 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 con-
temporary art, and its lineage is that of the periphery, the transgressors, and alter-
native 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 rea-
soning, 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 disem-
powerment, 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 concep-
tualizing 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 mate-
rial: the stuff that comprises it, the metal of its fences, the desert sand, river cur-
rents, 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 climatologi-
cal 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 think-
ing 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 materi-
alist thought, an acknowledgment that human histories of inequality and struc-
tural 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 nonhu-
mans, 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 the-
ory, 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 panora-
mas 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-cent-
ers 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 weight-
ing 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
126 Ila Nicole Sheren
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 bor-
der 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 ongo-
ing “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 ecol-
ogy 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 installa-
tion 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 con-
tested 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 twenty-
first 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 acquisi-
tion 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 move-
ment. 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 epistemolo-
gies 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. Close-
ups 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 disjunc-
tive assortment of images falls on the ontographic technique of the list to draw
connections and order them. Humans, animals, plants, and other nonhumans pop-
ulate 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
128 Ila Nicole Sheren
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 disap-
pearance, 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 vel-
vet 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 rich-
ness 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 dis-
advantaged. At the same time, preservationist rhetoric permeates the commit-
tee report about the land’s status. To return to the Postcommodity installation
on the US-Mexico border, the 1848 dividing line enacts a similar reclassifica-
tion, 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 catego-
ries 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 desta-
bilize traditional hierarchies and recognize the importance of non-Western episte-
mologies 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 inequal-
ity remain encoded in these locations, and as such must overlay any attempts to
fully de-hierarchize the land.

Notes
1 Balibar, 217.
2 See Sheren, pp. 90–113, for more on The Cloud.
3 For more on Land Art and its relationship to ecological thought, see Nisbet.
4 Barad, 39–70.
5 Mignolo’s explanation of “border thinking” can be found in Mignolo, 9–10.
6 Leivick’s portfolio can be accessed at https://danielleivick.com/portfolios/ajo-tran
sect.
7 Harbage Page’s series Objects in the Landscape and the Anti-Archive can be accessed
at https://susanharbagepage.com/u-s-mexico-border-project/.
8 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.
9 Zyman, 28.
10 Macdonald et al., 44.
11 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.
12 Obrist and Kanwar, 68.
13 Macdonald et al., 46.
14 Halkort, 63.
130 Ila Nicole Sheren
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 experi-
ence 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 origi-
nally 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
132 Ignacio Infante
here and now is acknowledged by Peri Rossi as never escaping the past, and ulti-
mately, as I will argue in what follows, as never leaving the experience of exile.
This chapter explores Sigfried Kracauer’s concept of extraterritoriality in rela-
tion to the poetic work of Peri Rossi, within the larger critical framework pro-
posed 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 flat-
tening 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 chap-
ter 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 preoccupa-
tion 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 left-
wing 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 intel-
lectual 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 pub-
lication 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 sal-
vado 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 ciu-
dades 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 shel-
ters 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
134 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 particu-
lar 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 examina-
tion 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 repre-
sentation 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 juxtapo-
sition 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 con-
ditional 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 cre-
ate a complex series of semantic and temporal implications that transcend a par-
ticular 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 photo-
graphs 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
136 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 aspira-
tions 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 understand-
ing 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 dimen-
sion – 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 articula-
tion 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 palimp-
sest 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 rep-
resenting 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 recog-
nizable 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 “illumi-
nated 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 “extraterritorial-

ity” 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 palimp-
sest 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 “extraterritorial-
ity” is highlighted by Tara Forrest, through a close reading of key passages of
Kracauer’s theorization of “extraterritoriality” in History, in the following terms:
138 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 histo-
rian 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 influ-
ential essay “The Translator’s Task.” There is, therefore, a sense in which, for
Kracauer, “extraterritoriality,” primarily because of the palimpsest of tempo-
ralities upon which it is structured, as examined here, constitutes a realm of
new epistemological – and perhaps also ontological – possibilities of experi-
ence 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 ter-

ritory 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 “prom-
ise 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 possibil-
ity” (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 “uni-
versal 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.
140 Ignacio Infante
As shown in this chapter, while the various figurations of alterity articu-
lated 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 dimen-
sions 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 experi-
ence of exile – what Sophia McClennen has called “exile’s time” in her influ-
ential 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 experi-
ence – both poetic and historical, as argued here – open up new epistemologi-
cal and ontological implications that considerably expand the dialectical model
and reading of the temporality of exile developed by McClennen, while collaps-
ing 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 (pre-
modern), 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 rup-
tured 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 jour-
ney 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 dis-
course 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 mobiliza-
tions were complex and other factors too came into play. These religious migra-
tory 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 refu-
gees who fled England and Ireland for the Iberian Peninsula. I do not purport to
offer new historical insights into the complexities surrounding these religious ref-
ugees but rather examine how these religious migrants were depicted in Catholic
writings of the time as well as investigate the transformation of these migrant bod-
ies into martyrs within the framework of clerical masculinity. Finally, my overall
146 Stephanie Kirk
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 reli-
gious 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 colo-
nization 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 com-
monwealth in which Papal Supremacy would promote a cosmopolitan identity
that ruled above all nations and empires and that was truly a transnational impe-
rium (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 sup-
pressed Irish Catholic majority and helped mitigate the “sense of loss, displace-
ment 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 mis-
sion 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 ungrate-
ful 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 possi-
ble 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 seem-
ingly 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,
148 Stephanie Kirk
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 surpris-
ing that there was considerable leakage out of the colleges into religious minis-
tries 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 secu-
lar priesthood2), Santiago de Compostela, Seville, Madrid, and Lisbon, Portugal.
The Jesuit Robert Persons, a key figure in the establishment of the English mis-
sion 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, provid-
ing 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 surround-
ing 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 impris-
oned 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 com-
mon 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 formula-
tion, 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 reli-
gious 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 trac-
tion 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 occupy-
ing 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 persever-
ing 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 mis-
sionaries 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 proclama-
tion 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 transla-
tion into French, German, and Italian (Lockey 81). This trajectory, although influ-
enced 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 mobi-
lized 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 coun-
terreformation 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 lat-
ter 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 cel-
ebrated 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 rep-
resentation 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 indica-
tions of violence (297). Instead, as he explains, they were intended to offer stu-
dents 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 unre-
markable 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 cap-
ture 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 per-
formative “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 accept-
ance in Spanish society and memorialize their sacrifice for generations to come
for Catholic adherents. Writings such as the Historia particular de la persecu-
cion 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, origi-
nal 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 impor-
tant 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 sup-
port 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 per-
suade 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
154 Stephanie Kirk
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, grant-
ing 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 net-
works 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 exam-
ple 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 con-
fines 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 enter-
ing the College of St. Omer only to be expelled from there. Shortly afterward, he con-
cocted 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” mar-
tyrdom, “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 his-
tory 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 cen-
tury, 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 agricul-
tural 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 establish-
ing population enclaves aimed at increasing agricultural production.3 The miti-
mae, 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 preven-
tion 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:
158 José Antonio Mazzotti
Y los indios son propietarios naturales deste rreyno, y los españoles, natu-
rales 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, miti-
macpa 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 discur-
sive 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 popula-
tion 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 indig-
enous population saw itself highly depleted by forced labor, epidemics, malnutri-
tion, 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 stand-
ard 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 contrib-
uted to the development of a mining extraction production system in place of agri-
cultural production and its dominance of ecological floors, perfected over many
centuries of Andean civilizations. The displacement of the indigenous popula-
tion was complemented by the forced importation of slaves, mostly from central-
western 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 nine-
teenth century. “Between 1849-1879, the hacienda owners and concessionaires
of guano [bird manure used as fertilizer] made the transfer of about 100,000 coo-
lies [Chinese laborers]” (Chang-Rodríguez 393). That almost forced and mas-
sive 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.
160 José Antonio Mazzotti
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 cen-
tury, 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 televi-
sion), 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 fol-
lowed 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 through-
out 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 “dedi-
cated 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, contribut-
ing, 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 popula-
tion 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 eco-
logical destruction of a vast agricultural region” (74-75). And not only that, histo-
rians 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 gener-
ated 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 dan-

gerous 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 south-
ern 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.
162 José Antonio Mazzotti
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 head-
waters 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 cor-
porations and local migration dynamics in Peru” have produced “changes in
migration patterns in the Cajamarca region” in the first decades of the new cen-
tury. An exemplary case study is that of the gold mining operations of Newmont
Mining Corporation. Bury considers “household migration behavior in com-
munities 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 denomina-
tor of neocolonialist practices, not too different from the colonial mit’a imple-
mented 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 encourag-
ing landowners and cattlers to burn the jungle in order to gain more areas for pas-
ture 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 administra-
tion 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 cur-
rent 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, lin-
guistic, 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 com-
munity, 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 ani-
mals 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 under-
standing 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 Aymara-
speaking 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 neolib-
eral 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:
164 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 stop-
ping 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 domésti-
cas, 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 sur-
rounded 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 pen-
insular 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 end-
ings 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 approx-
imately 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
166 José Antonio Mazzotti
important La presencia europea en el Perú, a compilation of several authors, which
includes studies on how English, Jewish, Swiss, Slavic, Italian, and Basque immi-
grants 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.”
8 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).
9 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.
10 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.
11 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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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 expan-
sion of globalization at the end of the 1970s. In Mexico, globalization reveals
itself through constitutional and institutional state reforms that imply the progres-
sive 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 annul-
ment 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 indig-
enous people of Mexico (and Latin America) were ready to defend their sover-
eignty 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 indige-
nous rural-urban and transnational migration? Can we assume that collective con-
trol 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 perma-
nent deterritorialization of the migrants. The temporary absences of indigenous
transnational migrants seem to reinforce, instead, the sense of territoriality and
170 Stefano Varese
communal-territorial citizenship as much in the migrants as in those that remain
behind. There are no obvious indications that the transnational migration is caus-
ing the territorial-structural dissolution of the community. This new “distant
belonging” of individual and social identity is a hypothesis that should be empiri-
cally 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 agricul-
tural 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 dur-
ing 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 anthropolo-
gist 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 local-
ized 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 particu-
larly 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.
 Language of space 171
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 ter-
ritorial, 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 demon-
strate somewhere else, are a set of tightly interwoven questions (Varese, Local
Epistemologies).
Recently, the question of Latin American indigenous people’s land/terri-
tory 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 pro-
ductivist 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 scien-
tists as peasants, that is to say that they have been put symbolically in the prover-
bial “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 through-
out different larger social formations (precolonial and colonial states, and contem-
porary republican nation-states of all political coloring).
It is well known that the extreme civilizational and ethnic diversity of preco-
lonial 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 phenom-
ena of Indian urbanization. These new multiple indigenous ethnoses that recon-
figured 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 Euro-
American and Eurocentric perspectives and interests.
172 Stefano Varese
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 con-
tributions 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 philosophi-
cally 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 deter-
ritorialized 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 Cook-
Lynn, the “language of place”: a language embedded in the locality, in the con-
crete 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, eclecti-
cism over dogma, and multiplicity over bipolarity. This is why a paradigmatic
shift that accentuates “topos” rather than “logos” is needed to understand indige-
nous 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 phenom-
enon, 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/com-
munal/territorial expressions, who since the sixteenth century have succumbed
under Euro-American expansionism – must be a global and a hemispheric one.
 Language of space 173
The local (each indigenous people, culture, ethnohistorical formation) acquires
full meaning as long as it is perceived as dialectically constructed within the struc-
ture and configuration of colonial and neocolonial power, which since its incep-
tion 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 rec-
ognition 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 his-
torically 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 biodi-
versity 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 con-
centrating, 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 manage-
ment are millennial practices and sciences that resulted from early intentional and
planned domestication of plants such as corn, beans, squash, chiles, potato, mani-
hot, sweet potato, amaranth, peanuts, coca, tomato, avocado, tobacco, and thou-
sands 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 gravita-
tion toward diversity rather than homogeneity, eclecticism rather than dogma.
Polyculture, the nurturing of biodiversity, and the multiple use of the environ-
ment 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, domi-
nant 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 val-
ues, 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, jun-
gles, and deserts have been analyzed thoroughly by recent studies (Amin and Sale,
among others). This representation of the world and the resulting human position-
ing 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 strug-
gling to control it. Recently James C. Scott has explored extensively the cultural
obsession of homogenization in societies ruled by élite classes engaged in state-
building 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 sover-
eignty. 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 multi-
cultural 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 polycen-
tric 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
 Language of space 175
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 civi-
lizational proposition of the indigenous people of the Americas could be con-
densed 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 eco-
nomic, social, political, and cultural life of indigenous societies that have estab-
lished 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 incorpora-
tion 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 strug-
gling to live their social lives guided by these principles.
Obviously, for contemporary indigenous people, life in the midst of a per-
manent 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 ambi-
guities 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 neoclas-
sical 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 com-
munal 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
176 Stefano Varese
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, bur-
densome, 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 commu-
nity. 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 recog-
nizes 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 contem-
porary 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 ethnolin-
guistic groups) can be divided in the following schematic typology: (1) agrarian-
peasant 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 indig-
enous 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 bureau-
cracy 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 abso-
lutely 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
 Language of space 177
precolonial time, centuries of colonialism-imperialism (which produced frag-
mented 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 under-
standing 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 forag-
ers, 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 hier-
archically 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, complementa-
rity is the logical and practical concurrent principle of diversity and reciprocity
that allowed, for instance, the Andean peoples to build the elaborate and monu-
mental 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 com-
plementarity 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
178 Stefano Varese
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/terri-
tory 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 ter-
ritories 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 fed-
eral 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 sov-
ereignty? 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 lan-
guage. Two hundred years of failed attempts have modified some of the tenets
 Language of space 179
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 expres-
sion 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 trans-
national 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 resist-
ance. 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 sys-
tematically 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 pro-
tection 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 dysfunc-
tional and absentee governments, the right to stay put, to remain in the land of
180 Stefano Varese
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 civili-
zational 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 peo-
ples, 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.

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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 phantas-
matic 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 medi-
cines 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 sit-
uation 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 con-
figured the geo-social construct of European colonialism that morphed in time
into industrial capitalism, and more recently became a neoliberal globalized sys-
tem. 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 con-
stituted through racialization. Frantz Fanon explained colonization’s dehuman-
izing 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 rela-
tionship of colonialism, imperialism, and immigration as a constitutive histori-
cal 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 benefit-
ted 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 migra-
tion. Gutiérrez Rodríguez placed the asylum-migration nexus in the same histori-
cal 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 pre-
sent, 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 alterna-
tive reconstruction to explain their absence in grand narratives of Western history.
Mayas embody those traumas lingering for centuries even when unspoken. I bor-
row 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 free-
dom 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
 From genocide to Hieleras 185
term is from Martinican poet Aimé Césaire (1913–2008).2 The slave experience
evidences the incompleteness of the Western notion of freedom in Western politi-
cal 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 differen-
tiation 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 dis-
aster. Catastrophes may start as disasters, but “they bring that undefined extra. . .
that crisis and disaster do not carry” (335). They “are incalculable, uncontrol-
lable, 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 wealthi-
est 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 astronom-
ical 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 agri-
cultural system fed millions in hundreds of large metropolises.
Maize was the epicenter of their culture, organizing a holistic web of relation-
ships 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 plant-
ing 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 eco-
systems 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 veg-
etation 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 beneficiar-
ies 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 trib-
ute, they were left alone.
The Alliance expanded fast. The demographic explosion of the Late Mexica
period generated widespread intensification of agriculture, while also improv-
ing 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.
 From genocide to Hieleras 187
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 fam-
ine 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 mil-
lion 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 peo-
ple 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, accord-
ing 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 colo-
nialization. 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 oper-
ate 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 spi-
raled 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 cen-
tury, 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 less-
than-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 dur-
ing 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 racial-
ized 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 sup-
ported 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 ref-
erence 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 baata-
bil 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
 From genocide to Hieleras 189
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 corpora-
tions 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 ser-
pent. 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 under-
stood that this could undermine the colonial pillars sustaining the racialized sys-
tem. 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 dehu-
manizing 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 cru-
elty, 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 war-
time 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 simultane-
ously 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 con-
struction 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 min-
ing 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
 From genocide to Hieleras 191
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 transporta-
tion. 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 cir-
cumstances 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 communi-
ties. 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 contempo-
rary 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 con-
sequences 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 indescrib-
able terror they had lived. It also made evident psychological, social, metaphysi-
cal, 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 pro-
vides 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 gov-
ernments 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 vil-
lages. 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 agricul-
ture. 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 racializ-
ing logic of social imaginaries configured at the beginning of colonization. The
enduring effects of their epistemic power evidences their junction with racial capi-
talism. 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 rep-
resented 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 auton-
omy. 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
 From genocide to Hieleras 193
systems (22). These were ruled as terror formations sunk in absolute lawless-
ness 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, sys-
temic violence leads to the irreparable destruction of critical segments of human-
ity. 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.

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-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 coun-

tries has not only brought to surface the limitations of the region to find concilia-
tory 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 differ-
ence 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 strate-
gies and violence against popular subjects. My analysis focuses on political con-
flict 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 so-
called “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 pop-
ulism” 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
200 Jorge Daniel Vásquez
“inequality by difference.” This strategy reactivated colonial patterns of allocation
of racial difference and “foreign status.” However, I also indicate that “inequal-
ity by difference” is confronted by political actors who articulate around equal-
ity 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 ana-
lytical 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 move-
ment 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 mil-
lion in July 2019. Thus, by July 2019, 3.4 million Venezuelan migrants resided
across Latin American countries (UNICEF 2018; UNICEF 2019a).3 The com-
monly 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 prede-
cessor 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 require-
ments 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 neolib-
eral 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 middle-
class 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 deten-
tions were arbitrary) in the midst of confrontation between the police and protest-
ers.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 legiti-
macy 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 simulta-
neously produce racial and political boundaries, the boundaries whose produc-
tion 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
202 Jorge Daniel Vásquez
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 sig-
nificantly 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, offi-
cials, 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 even-
tual 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 politi-
cal 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 cri-
sis. 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 coun-
tries, 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 con-
trol 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, corrup-
tion, 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 cri-
sis,” economic crisis, and political crisis can be registered in a two-moment ana-
lytical 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 real-
ized 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 for-
mulation of policies and the selective use of ethnocentric, essentialist, eugenic-
hygienist, 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).
204 Jorge Daniel Vásquez
Failure to do this counterpoint would conceal how in Latin America, the dif-
ferent 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 citi-
zenship 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 manipula-
tion 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 sus-
ceptible 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 neolib-
eral pact resorted to ‘Venezuelanization’ to block the configuration of the politi-
cal 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 sup-
port 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 indig-
enous 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 threaten-
ing 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 ideolog-
ical 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 dis-
torting 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 opera-
tion 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.
206 Jorge Daniel Vásquez
The social and popular bloc insisted on the popular and anti-neoliberal char-
acter of the protest, and not exclusively as demands of the indigenous move-
ment. 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 ques-

tion 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 gov-
ernment 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 lead-
ers,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 differ-
ences. 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 gov-
ernment (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.
208 Jorge Daniel Vásquez
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 associa-
tion 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 pub-
lic 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 right-
wing 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 analy-
sis 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 fron-
tiers, 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.

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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 coun-
tries, 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 dif-
ferent 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 peo-
ple 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 cat-
egory has entered into the humanitarian world is through quantitative considera-
tions and official statistics. The current statistical report from the United Nations
High Commission of Refugees claims that there are 70.8 million displaced per-
sons worldwide distributed in this way: 25.9 million refugees, 3.5 asylum seek-
ers, 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 regis-
tered 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 refu-
gees, 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
214 Juan Ricardo Aparicio
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 restitu-
tion 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 “articu-
lation” 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 “vis-
ibilities” 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 soci-
ety, 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 dis-
puted, 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 subjectifica-
tion 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 humanitar-
ian 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 genealo-
gies, 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 prac-
tice 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 interna-
tional 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 con-
flicts, 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 com-
munity. The MSF officer made it clear: “the starting point of the [MSF’s] inter-
vention 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 geneal-
ogies 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
216 Juan Ricardo Aparicio
Europe’s political system to lay bare its hidden frame (267). Loescher esti-
mates 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 dissolu-
tion of the old multinational empires in Eastern Europe and the Balkan region
and the expansion of the nation-states attempting to create culturally and politi-
cally homogenous groups, forced millions of people to abandon their home-
lands 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, national-

ity, 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 protec-
tion of that country (…).
(UNCHR Statute, 1951)

For Loescher, this persecution-centered definition, molded by Western states, per-

ceived 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 inter-
nal 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 interna-
tional institutions (Chandler). Chandler identifies two strands of the ‘new humani-
tarian’ interventionism that predate the post–Cold War consensus. The first “was
the extension of involvement from the provision of immediate assistance to vic-
tims 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 devel-
opment in the 1970s” (Chandler 27).
For some of these human rights NGOs, a whole reconfigured notion of sover-
eignty 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 per-
sons” (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 cri-
sis. 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 success-
ful 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
218 Juan Ricardo Aparicio
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 emer-
gency 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 meas-
ure the treatment of internally displaced persons worldwide. By the time of the
Representative’s 1998 report, the IDP problem had almost become a fully sta-
ble 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 insti-
tutional 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 Secretary-
General 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 previ-
ous 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 dis-
placements. 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 dimen-
sions” (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 capac-
ity, 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 norma-
tive and institutional foundation upon which to build a more effective and sustain-
able 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 displace-
ment. 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 perse-
verance 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, identi-
fied 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 abso-
lute paralysis of land restitution and formalization of the integral rural reform,
both central dilemmas for the IDPs population and their prospect of overcoming
220 Juan Ricardo Aparicio
their specific vulnerabilities5. On the debate about what would be a partial solu-
tion or a complete overcoming of displacement-related vulnerability, one won-
ders 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 pre-
cisely 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, not-
withstanding 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 non-
combatant 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 self-
entrepreneurs, 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 sys-
tem 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 humanitar-
ian dispositifs. I am referring to the construction of a multilayered and complex
alternative for moving beyond the frameworks of ‘good governance’ and ‘state-
responsibility’ 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.

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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 offi-
cially 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 land-
slide, leftist president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (also known as AMLO)
proposed to end anti-drug militarization and to reconsider the violent prohibition-
ist policy seeking to pacify the county. But as his government suspended a pro-
posal 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 com-
prehend the geopolitical significance of the violence attributed to México’s “drug
war.” As official discourse is now clearly in tension between a violent neolib-
eral state of exception and López Obrador’s proposal to deescalate antidrug mili-
tary 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 concep-
tualizations 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 plunder-
ing 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 par-
ticular case of the recent wave of violence in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas,
 Dispossession by militarization 225
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 nar-
ratives 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 attrib-
uted 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 expan-
sive 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 con-
versely, 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 previ-
ous 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 repli-
cating baseless official justifications for the militarization, neither book is in fact
226 Oswaldo Zavala
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 struc-
ture of armed groups but also organized in its relationship to capitalism” (8).
Against the prevailing assumption that the state retreats under neoliberal gov-
ernance, Paley and Granovsky-Larsen observe the government in charge of set-
ting “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 secu-
rity 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 battle-
ground, 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 chan-
nels. 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 avail-
able 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
 Dispossession by militarization 227

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 military-
style 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 simi-
lar 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 extraju-
dicial 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 govern-
ment’s new security policy (Mercado). On January 30, 2019, about eight weeks
228 Oswaldo Zavala
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 expan-
sion 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 evi-
dence, 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 sig-
nificant 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 inhab-
itants. The only other state with such violence surge was Chihuahua. After a simi-
lar 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
 Dispossession by militarization 229
precisely to curb the violence (Fierro). In this discussion, as I argue in the follow-
ing 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 abun-
dant 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 anthropolo-
gist 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 approxi-
mately 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 reli-
able global source is still the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center (IDMC),
based in Geneva, whose figures closely followed those of the human rights organ-
izations and scholars in Mexico and Latin America.
In all of this research, however, there is one common denominator: the unchal-
lenged, 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 loca-
tions. 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 strate-
gies” 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 militariza-
tion “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
230 Oswaldo Zavala
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 govern-
ment 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 com-
panies 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 deliber-
ately 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 resist-
ance” (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 regu-
lations 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 pre-
sumed 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 pen-
insula, all the states at the Gulf of Mexico (Tabasco, Veracruz, and Tamaulipas)
and the Northern border states of Nuevo León and Coahuila. This region coin-
cides with the area of intense gas extraction conducted by multi-national energy
 Dispossession by militarization 231

Figure 17.2 Map of alleged “influence” of “Los Zetas”. Source: El Universal Newspaper:
<https://archivo.eluniversal.com.mx/graficos/graficosanimados12/EU-LosZ
etas/influencia.html>.

conglomerates with the approval of the Energy Secretariat of the Mexican federal
government. Source: <https://archivo.eluniversal.com.mx/graficos/graficosani
mados12/EU-LosZetas/influencia.html>.
A map of natural gas infrastructure and its corresponding multi-national extrac-
tive 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: <https://www.gob.mx/sener/articulos/mapa-infraestructura-nacional-de
-gas-natural-2016>.
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 equip-
ment and training to help México “disrupt” the capacity of “organized crime” to
 232
Oswaldo Zavala

Figure 17.3 Official 2016 map of government extractive infrastructure of natural gas. Source: Mexico’s Energy Secretariat: <https://www.gob.mx/s
ener/articulos/mapa-infraestructura-nacional-de-gas-natural-2016>.
 Dispossession by militarization 233
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 with-
out 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” oper-
ates 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 mili-
tary 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 vio-
lence. 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:
234 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 “inter-
nal 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 mecha-

nism 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” ter-
ritories 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”, depopu-
lates 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 resi-
dent 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 out-
skirts 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 pro-
cess 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 peas-

ant 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 pre-
dominantly internal, the external conditions matter.
(154–55)
 Dispossession by militarization 235
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 capital-
ist 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 accumula-
tion to operate, “capitalism necessarily and always creates its own ‘other’” (141),
that its, the outer limits of the system where dispossession ventilates capital sur-
plus 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 hostil-
ity 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 citi-
zens 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 bat-
tery power for electronics, cars, airplanes, and even spacecrafts, the object of con-
stant 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
236 Oswaldo Zavala

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 popu-
late”, 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 trans-
formation 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
 Dispossession by militarization 237
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 “drug-
related 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” suppos-
edly 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 neo-
liberal 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 phe-
nomenon 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.
238 Oswaldo Zavala
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.

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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 sov-
ereign 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, regard-
less 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 desir-
able 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” inte-
gration managed? How are migratory categories (migrant, asylum seeker, ref-
uge, etc.) arbitrarily deployed to decide claims in receiving states? Utilizing a
case study of Iraq War refugees resettled in Brazil, I will address these ques-
tions 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 cal-
culus 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 oscil-
lated 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 “tempo-
rary” 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 refu-
gees 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 agree-
ment. 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 com-
munities. The Brazilian overture to these specific refugees also bypassed the nor-
mative 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 representa-
tive 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 inter-
views 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 accept-
ance 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
242 Bahia M. Munem
a good health system, very good health, but there are limits. There is no way
to forever bankroll a very ill elderly person.
(Interview. July 17, 2010)

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 cal-
culus 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 qual-
ified 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 responsibil-
ity 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 coun-
try’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 self-
sufficient or have family support” (BPC). Regardless of the vulnerable and precar-
ious conditions in which migrants might find themselves, however, government
assistance is denied – even if the policy runs contrary to the constitutional guar-
antee 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 resettle-
ment 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)
244 Bahia M. Munem
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 cen-
tury (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 even-
tual 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 spa-
tial 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 repre-
sentative, however, referred to this as a “cultural” issue.

Culturally speaking, they did not accept to be there. They wanted to be inde-
pendent, 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 inca-
pable 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 ben-
efits that other…populations can assume as inalienable” (2004, 35). She reminds
us of the hierarchies of citizenship and the scales of social and political disenfran-
chisement 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 nation-
als 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.
246 Bahia M. Munem
The director concluded our conversation by saying, “these resettled [people]
received far more than Brazilians themselves. I do not agree with the govern-
ment, 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 dis-
course 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 exploi-
tation 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 suspen-
sion 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 comedic-
tragedy 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-middle-
class 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 lan-
guage, is not well perceived, and they knew they were not…A degrading, dis-
gusting 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 signifi-
cantly reconfigure the space they occupied, which was an affront to the neighbor-
hood’s class sensibilities. There was a clear and growing tension between the
refugees seeking visibility and their unsightliness as perceived by the neighbor-
hood residents.
As the protest continued, the refugees’ bodies were seen as excess: excessively
old, idle, “evil looking,” demanding, needy, and therefore ultimately undesir-
able. 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 refu-
gees’ 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.
248 Bahia M. Munem
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 offi-
cial commitment to reinstate monthly stipends. By then a lot had changed for the
elderly protestors. The three remaining were forcibly removed from their encamp-
ment. 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 mer-
chants 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 con-
ditions, 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.
250 Bahia M. Munem
By examining the fault lines in Brazil’s healthcare and social benefits pro-
grams, as they relate to elderly and ill refugees, the uneven access to state pro-
grams 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, per-
formed 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 con-
testing 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 recog-
nized 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 pre-
vious 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 repeat-
edly 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 under-
scores the importance of the naming conventions that categorize people in flux.
In the United States, migrants or economic migrants (documented or undocu-
mented) 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 imple-
mented 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-reli-
ance. The ability to “carry their own weight” has long been a means to evalu-
ate 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 displac-
ing 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
252 Bahia M. Munem
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 independ-
ent 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-additional-
humanitarian-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 inadmis-
sibility.” See: https://www.uscis.gov/legal-resources/final-rule-public-charge-ground-
inadmissibility
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

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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
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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/
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Durham: Duke University Press.
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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-additional-
humanitarian-aid-venezuelans-who-fled-country
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of Inadmissibility. Accessed January 28, 2020. https://www.uscis.gov/legal-resources/
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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 perspec-
tive, 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, transcul-
turation, and translocation. In this task, I follow the political-epistemic engage-
ment 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 in-
between 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 Rican-
ness, 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 move-
ments 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 trans-
gressing 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 entan-
glement 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 anti-
racist, 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 subjectivi-
ties, 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 anti-
colonial 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 politi-
cal 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 intersec-
tion of locations (gender, class, sexual, ethnic-racial, generational) which consti-
tute 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 theori-
zation 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 transcultura-
tion 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 cat-
egory 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 mean-
ings. 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 uproot-
ing. 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 creoliza-
tion 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 strug-
gle, 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 creoliza-
tion. 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 cre-
olization 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, sexual-
ity – 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 con-
ceptualize and investigate power constellations and formation of identities on a
decolonial key. Both categories are based on critical visions of imperial/colo-
nial 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 trans-
local 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; para-
dise 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 prob-
lem 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 world-
region 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 dis-
tinct 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 consti-
tuted 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 plu-
ral 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 bounda-
ries” 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. domi-
nation intermix in this scheme” (Global Transformations, 7–8). Pursuing a simi-
lar 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 medi-
ated. 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 articula-
tion 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 capi-
talist development, but is also the product of everyday resistances, social move-
ments, 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 signifi-
cance 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 regional-
ity are unpacking categories (e.g., slavery, plantation, African), identifying histor-
ical 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 lat-
ter 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 prim-
itive 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 cross-
roads, 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 emer-
gent spatial organizations’’ take shape, (while) the simultaneous expansion and
contraction of political spaces (are framed by) the ‘‘multiple resistances, chal-
lenges, & 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 his-
torical processes of violent dispersions and dislocations such as conquest, slavery,
revolutions, and migrations.6 This diasporic condition implies challenging mono-
lithic 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 nation-
state, 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 primar-
ily 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 identifica-
tion, is grounded in what WEB DuBois conceptualized as double consciousness,
an uneasy sense of belonging to the nation, accompanied by affinities and iden-
tification 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 rep-
arations 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 quo-
tidian 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 theo-
rize a geo-historical space that is a kind of microcosm of global encounters, impe-
rial competition, capitalist development, and antisystemic struggles.
In African cosmologies, crossroads, as places of multiple crossings, are privi-
leged 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 mar-
ronage 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, econo-
mies, that serves as a historical foundation and as a method of production of criti-
cal 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 perspec-
tive 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 con-
ceptualized 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 creoliz-
ing, 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 map-
pings of time and space. Coronil argues that Occidentalism, rather than the
counterpart of Orientalism, is its condition of possibility, and offers the follow-
ing 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. natural-
ize 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 cross-
ing 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, eth-
nic-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 politi-
cal 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, Torres-
Saillant.
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).

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Quijano, Aníbal. Modernidad, identidad y utopía en América Latina. Lima: Sociedad y
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270 Agustín Laó-Montes
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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 entangle-
ments 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 cat-
egories. 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 loca-
tions from its accounts of capitalist modernity – from the particular historical
272 Manuela Boatcă
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 episte-
mological 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 institu-
tions 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 over-
seas. 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 col-
onies 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 indig-
enous peoples in the early sixteenth century, the demographic upheaval caused
by the arrival of up to 6 million enslaved Africans during the European trans-
atlantic 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 soci-
ology (Trouillot “The Caribbean Region” 20, Glick Schiller 22). As Trouillot
signaled, slavery in the Caribbean ended around the same time that the social sci-
ences 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
 Europe Otherwise 273
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 move-
ment 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 epis-
temic 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, mul-
tiracial, 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 his-
tory 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 transconti-
nental 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 decolo-
nizing 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
274 Manuela Boatcă
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 con-
struction 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” loca-
tion, linked to an alleged distance from “European values” (a mainstay of EU dis-
course) 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 colo-
nial 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,
 Europe Otherwise 275

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 “over-
seas 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
 276
Manuela Boatcă

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.
 Europe Otherwise 277
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 entangle-
ments 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 system-
atic omission of enduring colonial ties from public discourse on Europe alongside
the systematic avoidance of any overarching classification of current colonial ter-
ritories as regions of Europe2. As such, the coloniality of memory prevents any
overarching category from gaining legitimacy as European; references that occa-
sionally 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 moder-
nity 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 reli-
gions 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 van-
tage 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
 278
Manuela Boatcă

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).
 Europe Otherwise 279
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 depart-
ments of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana, and the French over-
seas 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 ter-
ritories to Europe through racialized hierarchies and economic dependence, the
notion of Caribbean Europe alerts us to the fact that “classic” administrative colo-
nial ties are still in force today and belies the assumption that formal decoloniza-
tion has ended.
The Caribbean has had the longest and the most complex history of entan-
glement 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 point-
ing 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 rein-
scribing 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
280 Manuela Boatcă
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 bor-
ders 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 posi-
tioned 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 metro-
pole: French presidential candidates all campaigned in the Caribbean territories
in the 2017 presidential elections, which earned Emmanuel Macron a signifi-
cant 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
 Europe Otherwise 281

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 con-
ventional understanding of Europe as a coherent continent and the modern politi-
cal 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
282 Manuela Boatcă
Union accession. Accordingly, a map of Europe that represents continental and
non-continental European territories as a single space and locates Europe’s cur-
rent 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 post-
Westphalian 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 inter-
national 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 dom-
inant 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 nation-
states. Here, too, the history and present-day social reality in the Caribbean sig-
nificantly 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 particu-
lar 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 radi-
cal 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
 Europe Otherwise
283

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.
284 Manuela Boatcă
creolizes the norm of the sovereign nation-state in the 21st century. The non-inde-
pendent Caribbean encompasses multiple political forms and overlapping zones of
affiliation that fall outside of the legal definition of either independent states or for-
mal 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 con-
tinuities 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 politi-
cal 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
 Europe Otherwise 285
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 refu-
gee 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 cen-
turies 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 rel-
egating 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.
286 Manuela Boatcă
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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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 height-
ened 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 oce-
anic studies (1, 3).1 Moving towards a Black Mediterranean entails both acknowl-
edging 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 dif-
ference 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 under-
stand 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 twen-
tieth century. Despite its insularity, Spain was nevertheless integral to Western
racialization projects, as George Mariscal argues, with medieval and early mod-
ern 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 prac-
tices and discourses that provides a conceptual repertoire from which spe-
cific 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 natural-
ized narratives of Europe based on the unquestionable Otherness of racialized and
colonized people. As visual engagements with race in the Mediterranean, sculp-
tures 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 read-
ings 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 nar-
rative 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 slav-
ery.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 eco-
nomic rationality and gives the colonizing metropole a false sense of superior-
ity. 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
292 Michelle Murray
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 national-
ist 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 com-
ercio 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 traffick-
ing 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 com-
missioning, 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 recon-
figures 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 signa-
tures 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 prolif-
eration 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 inde-
terminacy 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 colo-
nialism, 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 mem-
ory 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
294 Michelle Murray

Figure 21.1 Diallo protest at the plaza.

that conjures up El valle de los caidos (The Valley of the Fallen), a national monu-
ment 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 dictator-
ship, 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,’ ‘inva-
sion,’ 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 unquestion-
ingly honor them. Indeed, critiques of colonial history must also “include atten-
tion 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 possi-
ble. 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 signifi-
cance 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 theo-
rizes the role of statues and public memorials in his book Present Pasts: Urban
Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Huyssen connects monuments to nation-
alist 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 sta-
bility 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 controver-
sial 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 proce-
dures 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
296 Michelle Murray
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 suffi-
cient 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 ben-
efit, 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 lan-

guage and its explanations from the chains of authority… In such a prospect
emerges a diverse cartography whose continual transformation into a mul-
titude 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 underwa-
ter, 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 instal-
lation, “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 com-
plexities of “sea ontologies” (33). Referring to the Atlantic and the routes of chat-
tel 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 oce-
anic 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 afore-
mentioned 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 disap-
peared 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 migra-
tion, 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 peril-
ous humanitarian borderland that perpetuates policies that contribute to the broader
298 Michelle Murray
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 Spanish-
based 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 commemo-
rate 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 transporta-
tion 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 ethnic-
ity and national particularity” (19). I contest this notion. For, despite the ongo-
ing 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 plan-
etary 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 domi-
nant frame of the United States. Charting a black Mediterranean means building
upon the work of the black Atlantic and localizing sites of both struggle, solidar-
ity, 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
300 Michelle Murray
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 control-
ling women’s lives, bodies, and finances.
5 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).
6 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 recog-
nizing Republican and Nationalist soldiers who had fought in the Civil War at this site.
7 See “The Raft of Lampedusa Abdel” for an interview with Abdel, one of the migrants
whose life and story inspired the sculpture.
8 Important interventions in cultural studies–oceanic studies include special issues of
PMLA (Oceanic Studies, 2010) and Comparative Literature (Oceanic Routes, An
ACLA Forum, 2017).

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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 ethi-
cal 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 bor-
ders, 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 neolib-
eral 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 ideo-
logical 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 opera-
tion 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 neo-
liberal subterfuges in Europe and as an event that can betray the promise of a dif-
ferent 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
304 Mina Karavanta
history of the Black Mediterranean5 but the Farmakonisi case revealed the contro-
versial 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 sec-
tor 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 declar-
ing that they had simply implemented the law that permits the protection of bor-
ders 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 passen-
gers 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, politi-
cal, and social imaginaries that indigenous communities rely on for their “ sur-
vivance” (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 neo-
liberalism 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 rac-
ism. 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 sig-
nify 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 identi-
fied 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 criti-
cally 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
306 Mina Karavanta
cannot be adequately analyzed by biopolitics and its cognates. Crossing the bor-
ders, 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 liq-
uefy 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 neoliberal-
ism 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 nation-
states 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, espe-
cially 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 sub-
ject 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 dem-
onstrate 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 mas-
sive dispossession of native and indigenous communities, and the destruction of
their sociogenic codes and poetic mechanisms (Wynter 47). The resistant perse-
verance 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 pro-
vide 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 irre-
ducible to and incommensurable with the current fragile democracies shored up
with fences and surrounded by camps. In this case, this new subaltern at the bot-
tom 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 overpopu-
lating their democracies with the bodies of these rogue others that will eventu-
ally destroy western civilization, or so the fable goes. This other, a foreign body,
308 Mina Karavanta
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 imposi-
tion 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 with-
out)” (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 disin-
tegration 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 civiliza-
tion. 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-cen-
tury 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 democ-
racy 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 com-
munity 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 momen-
tum as it represents itself as the only pragmatic solution to the problem of num-
bers. 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 protect-
ing 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 par-
liament 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 jus-
tice, 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 sympto-
matically reveal a “mondialité” (Chamoiseau 53), a worlding that opposes glo-
balisation 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 through-
out 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
310 Mina Karavanta
modern nations and represent what he calls the “archives of ancient communi-
ties” [“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 poli-
tics, 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 decontextual-
izing the practices that sublate the concrete and individual histories and stories into
the larger trajectory, tendency or movement. The sublation can result in the forget-
ting 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, resist-
ance, and the political, social, and ethical work of dissent that the migrants, citi-
zens, 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 rest-
ing 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 jus-
tice 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 commu-
nities 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 nar-
ratives 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 record-
ing 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
312 Mina Karavanta
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 dis-
charged 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/the-
rescue-of-migrants-at-sea---obligations-of-the-shipping-industry
8 As Lisa Lowe remarks, the “forgetting of colonial difference in the accounts of neo-
liberalism” 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?.”

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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; cosmos-
centric 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

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
Index 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

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
Index 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 Index
63; confessional 146; crisis 192, 304,
307, 309; culture 245; deportee-as-
65; 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; empire-
284; -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