Migrating People and Material Culture and Art

I really find the sculpture and found-objects work of the artist Valerie James and Antonio Gallegos important socially conscious art, including the Las Madres Project and their new work now exhibiting in Sweden.  I am interested in immigrant/migrant material culture (such as retablos), and these artists work directly with material culture. In their art, James and Gallegos use the clothes, bordados (square white cloth embroidered with messages of caring that are given to people who are about to cross the border), children’s backpacks and notebooks, and other belongings that people had to leave behind.  Here are some internet links that describe their work (my apologies if some of the links may not eventually work, just let me know):

http://www.lasmadresproject.org/

http://www.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/washed-into-the-land/Content?oid=2096094

http://www.artandfaithinthedesert.com/2010/01/destination-x/

http://www.artandfaithinthedesert.com/2010/01/draft-excerpt-from-book-in-progress-bound-for-the-border-the-hidden-art-of-bordado/



Missing Pieces to Think About

The media discourse covering an event this week concerning the USDA firing an employee, Shirley Sherrod (former Director of Rural Development in Georgia), for “reverse racism”¹ and then apologetically offering to rehire her contains some missing pieces.  Some media is covering how the USDA did not fully investigate, but trusted the video clip especially edited by a conservative media individual, Andrew Breitbart to take the employee’s remarks out of context. The April 23, 2010 PBS show Need to Know broadcast featured a guest, Terence Samuel arguing that this series of events really showed how the USDA director was living in a past moment, expecting race to be about conflict not reconciliation, and that the outcome of the entire employee’s speech was really how Black women and White men have something in common in that moment (both facing the quick labeling for being “a racist”). To watch this discussion go to this link: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know/video/need-to-know-july-23-2010/2465/ .  The situation was complex, but there are more tools of analysis to draw from in order to make sense of these events.  I use the concepts of hidden transcript and White privilege for more insights.   

The hidden transcript concept goes well with this. James C. Scott brilliantly writes of hidden and public transcripts in his body of publications (including Domination and the Arts of Resistance). To very simply explain, the hidden transcript consists of those words and actions done “behind the scenes” apart from bosses, or parents or powerful people as one strategy to deal with the frustration of being less powerful, less in control, taken advantage of, and oppressed.  Often the hidden transcript can blend over into the public at a moment’s notice.  Sherrod was speaking in front of an audience who she believed would take her comments as part of the struggle of African American people who have a unique history and present day experiences facing racism on a constant and consistent basis. Students discussing the topic of hidden and public transcripts in one of my classes brought out the way new media and technologies may broadcast the hidden transcript to those it was not intended and out of context. Similarly the edited version of Sherrod’s remarks makes the slice of the speech appear as even more like a hidden transcript (something kept within a group of people who have faced similar life events and social positions), for the complete contextual journey of this USDA employee was missing from the clip. This particular hidden transcript (along the lines of "White people do not need help") is theorizing about what academics and diversity trainings call White privilege.  Having lived in the Jim Crow South, Sherrod (at seventeen²) faced the murder of her father by a White farmer and the continual privileging of Whites over Blacks within an entire social system.  The great social distance between those families and individuals labeled by society as “White” and those labeled as “Black” compounded Sherrod’s belief that White people didn’t need any help, economically or socially.  The story she tells within the speech moves from describing a White privilege that is unitary and homogenous to looking at how poverty or a shared economic struggle makes a differential experience of White privilege. Even within a working class, however, there still may be social systemic rewards for being White, though poor.  Here I turn to another event of the week that the public spent little time discussing. This is an event that exemplifies White privilege.  Black farmers actually did face numerous acts of discrimination by the USDA and were part of a series of successful major lawsuits against the USDA. However, this week Congress denied to pay a recent monetary settlement that the courts ruled was due to these farmers.  bell hooks book, The Culture of Place, reminds us that the agrarian roots of African Americans deserve closer attention and, to take her point further, that the lack of attention of what happened in Congress this week regarding African Americans shows how much Black agrarian life continues to be dismissed in the mainstream. Another question to ask when thinking of privilege regards the number of African Americans employed at the USDA. The following questions also crossed my mind. Was the quickness of the USDA action due to the fact that the racism was allegedly against a White farmer?  Would there have been more deliberation and slower action if the alleged racism was against a Black farmer?

It does appear as if there was more deliberation and slower action for Black farmers this week.  As stated earlier and again here for emphasis, during the same week as the firing of Sherrod and the attempt to reverse the firing, Congress refused to pay Black farmers in a lengthy lawsuit for discrimination by the Agricultural Department branch of the USDA and also refused to pay Native royalty owners the share of their settlement after years of having their royalty money funneled back to the U.S. and not property managed by the Interior Department.  Jalonick & Evans (2010, July 23) in The Washington Post wrote the following about the USDA lawsuit:

For decades, minority farmers have complained of being shut out by local Agriculture offices, well after the days of blatant segregation. African-Americans, for example, complained that loan committees across the rural South were dominated by white "good ol' boys" networks that gave the vast majority of loans and disaster aid to whites while offering scraps to blacks.

 Little media discourse or conversation focused on this. The current state of the economy, the federal deficit, and the upcoming election worked to create this instance of institutional racism. (Shirley Sherrod had been part of one of these class action lawsuits as a winning plaintiff.  However, during the brief media frenzy, she becomes an instigator of racism not the survivor of systemic racism.)  Focus for this week was on Sherrod who was fired for an “imaginary” act of racism, an alleged act done before she became a government employee.

Not only the lack of coverage of the non-existent settlement money but other larger themes can be seen as more missing pieces.  Media and public interaction moves away from or sidesteps conversations about race as a continuing significant identity and category that shapes people’s lives, moves away from considering whole contexts of statements and subaltern voices and the concomitant hidden transcripts in favor of sound bites. Public and media voices move away from connecting history to the present day, as well as from building foundations for potential conversations about racism and classism and the continuing struggles of racially and socioeconomic diverse communities and Native Nations who actually faced many acts of racism and classism historically and face them in the present-day.  An exception to this would be on Face the Nation on April 25, 2010 including the guests Michael Eric Dyson and Cornell West.  This link will take you to the show: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6712165n&tag=contentMain;contentBody

I hope this blog entry provides more input on thinking about last week’s events and future conversations on race.  The different missing pieces give us tools to think differently as David Pilgrim has said that we need to talk about race in a better manner and with better strategies.  Looking at hidden transcripts, entire contexts, histories, and nuances helps us toward that goal.

Notes

1. Reverse racism is a term that is very contentious, so I put it in quotation marks.
2. This was a very different experience recorded in the song “At Seventeen.”

References

Jalonick, M.C., & Evans, B. (2010, July 23). Despite Sherrod spotlight, black farmers denied. The Washington Post. Retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/23/AR2010072304584.html

Photojournalist Exhibit on the World-wide Problem of Malnourished Children

I noticed an interesting story, as I channel-surfed on Friday evening, about childhood malnutrition on Need to Know, a show I previously blogged about.  Here is a link to a photographic project raising awareness about the problem of malnourished children around the world: http://www.starvedforattention.org/#/stories  . The photographers are not from diverse backgrounds, and they do inject their personal opinions at times (such as the coverage on Mexico).  Some important overall information can be gleaned from this link, however. 

Part Two: The Death of Josseline: Stories from the Arizona-Mexico Borderlands by Margaret Regan

The stories in The Death of Josseline guide the reader into questioning policies and looking at the way policies shape the lives of individuals and the people connected to them as relatives, friends, neighbors, and acquaintances.  This particular book was presented by the author at the 2010 Tucson Book Festival along with other texts about the border by authors David Danelo (The Border: Exploring the U.S. Mexico Divide) and Philip Caputo (Crossers). [The entire panel is on C-Span, see Tucson Festival of Books, 2010, March 13.]  The panel conversation made for a contradictory presentation, truly showing the border as signifying different things to different people, being a totally different place depending on the discourse and lenses drawn on as focal points.  Regan’s book attempts to bridge these focal points, but provides voices and multi-dimensional representation to the literally missing bodies of people moving across borders (See the April 25, 2010 entry). In the panel discussion, David Danelo put the responsibility of border issues squarely on the shoulders of Mexico and individual Mexicans. Philip Caputo found the border to simply be an interesting place to set his novel.  But the approach in Margaret Regan’s book took a more multi-faceted and compassionate approach, beginning with highlighting Josseline Hernández, the teenager who died in the Arizona desert during the 2008 winter while she brought her younger ten year-old  brother across to meet their mother in Los Angeles. 

The stories that counter the images of criminalized immigrants in Arizona’s law SB1070 find textual root in this book and direct the questions about immigration and migration away from individuals to the social causes of migrant mobility. At the Book Festival and in the book’s prologue, Margaret Regan reported on the experience of Josseline and, in the book’s chapter, The Science of Death, the autopsy report recording Josseline’s cause of death from what was most likely hypothermia.  Another avenue to understanding these deaths is to examine and pinpoint the wider social determinants of death. What would an autopsy report look like if it broadened out beyond the individual and examined the social and economic policies and recorded the social determinants of death?  This is not a new idea; the video Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick? and numerous studies examines social factors impact on health.

Regan describes the increase of border crossing persons’ bodies found in the desert over the course of time linked to the border tightening and Operation Gatekeeper and the shutting down of more humane border crossing areas.

In those days [back in 1986], he [the medical examiner Dr. Bruce Parks] almost never saw the bodies of young girls, or adults, for that matter, with histories like Josseline’s. The annual number of identified migrant bodies delivered to his lab hovered in the single digits….After the clampdown of the late 1990s, the numbers started edging up. In 1998, 12 dead migrants were brought in; the next year 17. Then, in 2000…Dr. Parks’s tally shot up to 65….The next year he logged 75 and by 2002, the tally had skyrocketed to 146. (Regan, 2010, p. 158).

This exemplifies tracing policy influences as social determinants of death. The social autopsy report looks beyond the individual body to examine the body politic. The social determinants analysis may begin with looking at the larger structural factors pushing and pulling migration. First one can start with examining the need to move across the border (such as a transnational family being united or seeking paid employment), and secondly the process and pathway of the journey (inability to access documentation and using underground and more dangerous means of travel ). More insights that complement Regan’s book can be drawn on from the new book, Moving Millions: How Coyote Capitalism Fuels Global Immigration by Jeffrey Kaye as  well as Keeping Out the Other: A Critical Introduction to Immigration Enforcement Today edited by D. C. Brotherton and Philip Kretsedemas. One point that Kaye makes is that sealing the border just makes the people smuggling business more profitable and more sought after.

In conclusion, the larger social determinants that shape the lives and deaths of neighbors become easily lost in the predominate conversations and representations. The discourse tends to turn immigrants into strangers deemed dangerous, unresponsible, expensive, and criminal, rather than be about the dangers lurking within the larger social contexts that limit the range of available human choices.  One small part of the Book Festival conversation about the border posed the question, “Why is it so difficult to creatively design a [border] policy that works?” Maybe more conversation needs to veer toward answering that question and focus on plural policies (not policy) in many arenas (including the role of transnational capitalism and border enforcement) and to examine why migrating persons die at such a high rate (on the U.S. side of the border).

Regan, M. (2010). The death of Josseline: Immigration stories from the  Arizona-Mexico Borderlands. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Tucson Festival of Books: U.S. Mexico Border Panel (2010, March 13). Retrieved from http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/292489-2

The Death of Josseline: Immigration Stories from the Arizona-Mexico Borderlands by Margaret Regan: Part One

The first blog entry in this two-part series focuses on the book The Death of Josseline: Immigration Stories from the Arizona-Mexico Borderlands authored by journalist Margaret Regan. This section briefly summarizes the book. The book’s intensity and in-depth portrait-like expressiveness showcases the length of time Regan has spent writing about the Border and getting to know multiple border voices. In lived-life, academic, and popular literature the Borderlands are a unique place, with events, activities, and places uniquely only found there. McCrossen wrote, “In this transnational region strenuous governmental and individual efforts, and quite often, at times to prevent altogether, and quite often facilitate, the passage of people, capital, commodities, and goods across the international border” (2009, p. 5). Policies and laws enacted by multiple government and corporate institutions (both in the U.S. and Mexico in locations many miles away) have tremendous impact on the border region. This book provides the reader entrance into the multi-faceted issues, humanitarian crises, laws, rule-making, individuals, and groups along the border area of Mexico and the state of Arizona. What I got out of the book is how stories could be used  to exemplify how policy and social structures shape the lives and deaths of individuals (more on this in the next entry).

The book humanizes migrating families and individuals.  After reading the work, readers feel as if they have met so many people influenced by the Border and border policies. The scope of the book is wide. Regan (2010) wrote,

A kaleidoscope of characters roamed the borderlands at cross-purposes: la migra [Border Patrol] and los inmigrantes, international journalists, coyotes, drug smugglers, angry ranchers. Humanitarians outraged by the migrant deaths turned up to try to save lives, and Minutemen mustered ‘citizen patrols’ to guard American territory against foreign invasion (p.xxvii).

She visits with all of them, including the medical examiners, in order to include their voices. It is not just one border, as borderlands experts like to say, there are many borders, because la linea (the boundary line of the border) is used in many different ways and seen with many co-existing and clashing viewpoints.

Regan carefully provides social statements in her writing.  She includes multiple opposing voices as she sets the stage by looking at many people’s lives as they interact on the Border. Immigrants are unable to access immigration documents while “defenders” of the border cause environmental harm along with social harm.  Economic, homeland security, and immigration policies shape the lives of those crossers within this transnational place.  For example Regan recounts the story told to her by a twenty-five year old mother, Carmina Sanchez Cifuentes, explaining that with the shutdown of the maquilas (border factories) that had employed her and her family members, they moved North into the U.S. “Plenty of workers were stranded a thousand or even two thousand miles from home, and it was easier to try to hop the border than to go all the way back. So they did the logical thing, making what an economist would call a rational choice.” (Regan, 2010, p. 32) She makes the case through the voices of many people, that crossing the border is not “criminal,” but a method to survive, care, and provide for their transnationally-located families.

Certain policies contribute to migrating persons’ deaths in the Sonoran desert. An important website mentioned in the book is a weekly forecast showing the probability of death in the Arizona desert for each day due to the extremes of weather: <http://borderrisk.med.arizona.edu/crossingRisk.html>.

Regan explains how policies shifted from the access of safer crossing areas to being forced to cross through the desert.  The pro-humanitarian website Feet in Two Worlds emphasized that immigrant desert deaths were up 20% in 2009 (Graglia, 2009, September 29).  The use of the desert as a crossing point is a newer phenomenon.

Put simply, the United States had switched to a border policy that funneled migrants away from easy urban crossings and into the deadly Arizona outback…The abrupt sealing of the urban crossings [Operation Gatekeeper] did not stop impoverished migrants from trying to get into the United States…A federal Government Accounting Office (GAO) study found that the annual border deaths doubled in the years after Gatekeeper’s launch, and Arizona accounted for most of the increase (Regan, 2010, pp. xxiii-xxiv, xxv)

Other sources on these issues explain how border populations were accustomed to more of a revolving door type of border. This border was porous enough to provide a mobility to go back and forth and to visit relatives on the other side. The U.S. economy had utilized frequent migrations of Mexican citizens (as well as moving the U.S. border to encompass Mexican lands and peoples) as part of its economic engine, allowing migrating persons in to work, then during recessions forcing them to leave through deportations that even included deporting U.S. citizens.  Regan also depicts alternative policies and actions that have much more positive effects such as a microloan system for building businesses in Mexico.  Such constructive conversations are given little airplay in popular discourse.

Additionally, Regan also explains many negative aspects of immigration enforcement including the following:

• the new virtual wall technologies;
• the building of an actual wall (and the ladders soon afterward found to overcome the barrier)
• the lack of due process for arrested undocumented immigrants;
• the sometimes harsh conditions of holding cells;
• how those arrested on immigrant violations are housed with those found guilty of violent crimes;
• how the Border Patrol and immigration legal treatment and outcomes are inconsistent; and
• how deportation policies may separate family members from each other.

At the same time readers learn about more positive portraits of Border Patrol agents as well as humanitarian volunteers (such as Mike Wilson of the Tohono O’Odham Nation) who leave water, do searches, and advocate for the newcomers arriving through dangerous routes. This book does well at explaining how a section of the border contains multiple signifiers and meanings.  Despite the varied meanings, Regan even tries hard to find points of agreement among the diverse groups, to find overlaps in how the border is viewed and what actions can be done to improve the lives of those on all sides.

 In the next entry, I will address more of how the particular lives and deaths recorded in the book were touched and impacted by larger policies.

References

Graglia, D. (2009, September 29). Deaths of undocumented immigrants in Arizona desert increase over last year. Retrieved from http://news.feetintwoworlds.org/2009/09/29/deaths-of-undocumented-immigrants-in-arizona-desert-increase-over-last-year/

Servicio Meteorológico Predicción y Prevención de Mortalidad (SMPPM) (2010). Retrieved from http://borderrisk.med.arizona.edu/crossingRisk.html

McCrossen, A. (2009). Consumer culture in the United States-Mexico Borderlands. Durham & London: Duke University Press.

Regan, M. (2010). The death of Josseline: Immigration stories from the Arizona-Mexico Borderlands. Bosto, MA: Beacon Press.