Transnational Migration

Both Aihwa Ong and Nicholas de Genova's articles discussed ideas of transnational migration and what comprises "citizenship" or "illegality" in an age of globalization and modern capitalism.

It's striking to note some of the parallels in the two scholars' conclusions, considering the radically different stories and backgrounds of their subjects. Ong focuses on a group of Hong Kong-to-Bay Area emigrants that make up a so-called "money-elite," individuals who are wealthy and successful in Hong Kong and whose business, real estate, and social relations in America are part of an effort to accumulate cultural or symbolic capital (for themselves and their families). De Genova writes about Mexican migrants from very poor, rural villages who move to Chicago and suffer long hours and low wages in generally low-skilled jobs in order to earn what is still significantly more than what they would make in Mexico. Both Ong and de Genova note that these two groups are active agents in the shaping of their "self-identity" (Ong 88) or the "reconstitution of their own 'Mexican'-ness" (de Genova 96) in a "cross-cultural context" (Ong 88). Both authors also discuss the structural discrimination and racial hierarchy that presents itself across transnational spaces and borders.

Ong expands on the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu in discussing "strategies of accumulation and mobility," (93) which involve the adoption of "Euroamerican" cultural standards and trends, often starting with a Western education and degree. However, a major point of her article is that there are structural limits to this accumulation and mobility in the form of racism, historical ideas of subordination, and NIMBY politics. She brings up ideas of racial triangulation and the model minority in noting that the "American ethno-racial hierarchy" places "Asian subjects as a 'good,' but subordinated, minority" (100). This operates simultaneously with the desire of powerful figures to do business with successful Hong Kong emigrants: "'They want your Pacific Rim money, but they don't want you'" (108).

De Genova focuses on the nation-states of the U.S. and Mexico and the production of what he terms "Mexican Chicago," which represents a particular "conjuncture" of racialized and spatialized difference between these nation-states. He's not talking about assimilation on one end or displacement on the other, but a production of space (Mexican Chicago) that is defined by the social relations of migrant Mexicans, a space that is very much embedded in the present and future of Mexico itself. ("...a Chicago that can be claimed for Latin America" [120].) This is part of a process of "re-racialization" of Mexican-ness that is always defined in the context of the dominant racial order of the U.S.

I particularly liked de Genova's discussion of the U.S.-Mexico border, and the role of its enforcement in this transnational production of space. With Felipe's two stories, it's clear that the border is not static; at one moment, it is invisible (wiring money), and at another, it is a serious barrier (physically crossing over). The making and ummaking of boundaries is key in his discussion of transnational space and migration.

Golden Gulag

Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Golden Gulag explores the remarkable growth of California’s prison system since 1982 and discusses how and why such a massive prison expansion program was created. She also chronicles the grassroots opposition that has fought the ways in which the criminal justice system uses criminalization as the easy answer to social problems.

Gilmore identifies a pattern that leads to the use of what she terms “the prison fix” – a pattern beginning with growth, then leading to crisis, economic or political restructuring, surplus, and finally, the prison fix. She focuses on the idea that with growth come developments in labor and capital. In California, power blocs invested this capital in the military-industrial complex. Growth eventually gives way to crises of unemployment, rural displacement, or recession. The farm debt crisis resulted in a shift in available jobs, as well as a surplus of workers. Prisons are a strategy through which the state can be rebuilt after a crisis and subsequent structural change (many times under the guise of strict, anticrime administrations). The logic lies in the way prisons deal with surpluses: they make use of state capacities, idle land, capital, and manage to get low-wage workers off the streets. Thus, with prison expansion came harsher laws, increased sentence lengths, the “three strikes” law – all measures to guarantee more prisoners. The money for prison expansion was attained through LRBs (lease revenue bonds). Places to site prisons were found in rural areas like Corcoran, where growth had stagnated and those in power wanted to spark development. This is also pretty clearly shown in the movie "Prison Town, USA," which focuses on Susanville, another rural town in California whose industry now almost exclusively centers on prisons.

In revealing the ways in which prisons are actually used and the reasons for which they are built, Gilmore proves that the traditional view that dictates a connection between “crime” and “prisons” is not necessarily true. People accept prisons as a way of instilling order, increasing stability and reducing crime through means of “retribution, deterrence, rehabilitation, or incapacitation” (14). But as Gilmore notes, “Those jurisdictions that have not built a lot of prisons and thrown more people into them have enjoyed greater decreases in crime than states where incapacitation became a central government activity” (15). In short, prisons have become less about crime than about industrialization.

Another concept that Gilmore focuses on is the influence of grassroots organizations in opposition to prison expansion. Mothers Reclaiming Our Children (Mothers ROC) was created because of the startling frequency and intensity of people of all ages being locked into the criminal justice system, by the state. Their actions were meant to “educate, organize, and empower;” through this, they developed a process of identification through a common interest.

In this way, Gilmore (as well as the makers of Prison Town, USA) shows us the ways that this seemingly unstoppable prison-industrial complex affects the lives of real people, often making it extremely difficult for people who are caught in the system to ever escape.

What is a camp?

I find it interesting that this week's readings are introduced by questions like "What is a camp?" or "Where in the world is Guantanamo Bay?" It is telling of the tangled political and historical web that creates these fuzzy gray areas - a muddy no man's land of limited sovereignty or, as Kaplan terms it, a "legal limbo" (831).

The common thread between these readings is the discussion of spaces that are somehow borderless, where the "state of exception" becomes normal, ubiquitous. While I was reading Kaplan's "Where is Guantanamo?" I couldn't help but think back to our section on Chinatown, and Anderson's article on Chinatown as an idea, as a kind of Western notion constructed by racial ideology, on top of its very real physical identity. It seems that Guantanamo also exists as an idea and a place - a space that is formed by a history of U.S. imperialism and in which no real jurisdiction can be exercised. Individuals are stripped of status. As Kaplan notes, the "enemy combatant" (840) becomes a means of lumping transnational individuals into a simple, racialized category. Faceless and nameless.

The question of citizenship rights is explored more deeply by Ngai. What happens to these rights that somehow allows for abuses like the Japanese internment? As we discussed in class, this question is one that Agamben poses as well: "How could such events take place there?" There, referring to this transitional space, this idea of a camp that is also a historicized, physical manifestation of colonization and imperialism.

Questions that I wonder about in light of these readings: What is the value of citizenship in a camp? During a state of exception? Internment affected Japanese-Americans, citizens and non-citizens alike. Subjection to a state of political and legal limbo renders rights virtually meaningless. Is there a difference between prisoners' rights and citizens' rights in a camp?

Subjection

In "The Birth of the Reservation," Thomas Biolsi explores how the Lakota people went through an "internal pacification" within the specific space of the reservation, making them more easily controlled and subjected by the U.S. government with the help of the creation of the Office of Indian Affairs. Following Foucauldian principles, Biolsi's main point is that the state created new categories of identity and self-interest by which to know and control the Lakota, through four major processes: property ownership, determination of "competence", registration of the degree of Indian "blood," and registration of genealogy.

The process of allotment is a good example of how new kinds of individuals were created. By operating within a system of private property and ownership, the Lakota came to formulate new ideas of what makes land valuable and took on a new role in the private market. This is property ownership as a form of "modern subjectivity" - the creation of "new subjects with radically new interests and social and political relations to each other" (33). This marked shift in self-interest represents a parallel shift in social identity.

Signficiantly, Bolsi defines early on, "Subjection involves the official promulgation of fundamental social classifications through which individuals are to be known and allowed to act" (30). Thus, the ways that state institutions were able to classify the Lakota people enabled the government to more easily subjugate and control the Lakota Indians of the Great Sioux Reservation, including the ways they behaved. Bolsi's use of the concept of subjection also brings to mind Ngai's discussion of the alien citizen and the persistence of foreign- or Other-ness that often defines cultural attitudes and behaviors.

Smith also discusses subjection (notably of "women and indigenous peoples") in the framework of systemic power. She explores the ways that people, lands, and properties become "violable" via a process of "sexual colonization." This is not only subjugation of peoples and bodies, but also of nature. In this vein, she discusses environmental activism and racism as it relates to Native peoples and people of color, especially women.

Noxious New York

Julie Sze examines environmental justice activism on a community level in New York, while framing her argument in the context of privatization and deregulation. She focuses first on four major environmental campaigns, located in Williamsburg, Sunset Park, West Harlem and the South Bronx.

I wish Sze spent more time discussing the multi-ethnic and multi-racial coalitions of Sunset Park and Williamsburg. She noted that these were basically temporary coalitions, formed with a specific end-goal in mind, but considering the unique circumstances that led to their formation, I think it is important to recognize the potential power (and problems) of such alliances. Sze documents these campaigns and their efforts to curtail "noxious" siting (toxic/medical waste facilities, etc) to show that they share a common rhetoric of environmental justice while incorporating considerations of race, history, and geography.

Asthma is also a focus of Sze's book. She explores the politicization of asthma as it relates to issues of race and gender, and again discusses the importance of community activism in the effort to effect policy change.

I particularly liked Chapter 4 and its focus on "local and global trash politics." This is where Sze really starts to explore the consequences of privatization in the system of garbage and sanitation. It's a blurring of private and public spheres. What is most efficient? What is best for the public good?

One issue I had with these chapters, however, is the way Sze frames the resolutions of these conflicts of environmental justice. Though it is important to recognize the successes of these campaigns, I felt like Sze relied too heavily on them, without focusing on the big picture. Yes, organizations like OWN have accomplished goals and definitely sparked discourse on the matter of environmental justice and environmental inequality - but what now?

Barrio Dreams

Davila writes about the "cultural politics' of El Barrio (aka East Harlem), juxtaposing processes of gentrification and neoliberalism with the neighborhood's continuing "Latinization." She specifically focuses on Latinos in an effort to examine race and ethnicity from outside of a black-white paradigm.

I've been hearing about Barrio Dreams ever since I declared my Met Studies major my sophomore year. Now that I've actually had the chance to read it, I feel like it provides an interesting angle on neoliberal policies that come up again and again in classes that I have taken.

I particularly liked Davila's take on what she terms a "marketable ethnicity" - produced by policies and ideologies that support economic empowerment. The idea that privatization and "development" (read: gentrification) is virtually embraced and encouraged by "upwardly mobile aspirations" is both incredibly interesting and, like some others have already noted, somehow too all-encompassing in terms of capturing the consequences of community sentiment.

However, Davila provides an in-depth study of the historical and cultural development of El Barrio, and examines the ways that different Latino groups interact with one another as well as with Blacks and non-Latinos in East Harlem. This is a thorough perspective that I certainly appreciate after having read about many different theories of racial formation and racialization.

A Fire in Fontana

"Here I was on a bus going back to the camp in Arizona where my father still lived, and I knew there was a connection between my seatmate's joy and our having been put in that hot and windblown place of barracks."

Hong's analysis of Hisaye Yamamoto's work touches on pretty much all of the major themes we've covered thus far - racialization, citizenship, property rights, white privilege, the nuclear family, segregation and suburbanization. Clear and interesting, but no need to really rehash all of that here. I'm going to talk more about Yamamoto's piece.

I thought "A Fire in Fontana" was really poignant and expressive in showing how Yamamoto, as a young Japanese-American woman whose family was placed in an internment camp, came to align herself with a community and a movement that was not typically tied to Asian-Americans at all. She never formally identifies this, and it's almost as if she can't quite put her finger on why she was so personally affected by the experiences of African-Americans around her, only that she was. It was "some kind of transformation" - her "inward self being burnt black in a certain fire." I really like the way she describes this process of change within herself. It's not that things were happening without her control, it's that they were happening before she even had the idea to consider what they meant. Totally true to life. We can recognize that change is happening, but we need to look at it retrospectively to really understand it.

Her reaction to the blond girl who expressed delight at a young black man being forced to drink from an outside tap, shows that she felt the power of this girl's racism without ever defining it as that - racism. She "knew" that this individual's joy in inequality had something to do with the inequality she experienced as a girl - and recognized a kinship in this, between the African-American experience and her very own.

From Enclave to Ethnoburb

This week's readings made a lot of sense together. They focused on the evolution of the Chinese-American enclave and the Chinese-American economy. Together, they chart a clear trajectory of the development of residential and economic patterns, including the roles that these entities play in each other's development, and how all of this interacts with cultural and racial ideas of the Chinese-American population.

Anderson's "The Idea of Chinatown" focused on Chinatown as a Western construction, both a place and an idea, structured by prevailing racial and racist ideologies. By studying the development of Vancouver's Chinatown in the late 19th century, she claims that Chinatown existed first as a way of creating and justifying white understandings and categories of the Chinese. Chinatown was a means of perpetuating negative stereotypes - it was a "cesspool" for disease (thus, the Chinese are filthy and unsanitary), a center of prostitution and opium-smoking (thus, the Chinese are immoral and hedonistic). Similarly, Shah explores these perceptions of Chinatown as perpetuated by public health norms in San Francisco. The point is the same - this was a way of marking the Chinese as an Other - intrinsically different from whites, and distinctly unfavorable.

Cheng's "Out of Chinatown and into the Suburbs" builds on these historical notions of Chinatown by exploring postwar patterns of suburbanization among the Chinese community in the United States. As various Chinatowns declined, more and more Chinese moved outward - to the suburbs. But this was no accident - Cheng's whole point is that suburbanization equaled "Americanization." It was seen as a solution to racial division and a strengthening of democracy. Because minorities who moved to the suburbs eventually lost their strong ethnic ties to their community, they could then more easily assimilate, a process that was essential in promoting whiteness as the norm, as the true marker of being American.

Li's article on Chinese-American banking and its relationship to community development in the LA area made a really interesting distinction between the ethnoburb and the ethnic enclave. "Unlike ghettos and enclaves, ethnoburbs emerge from the deliberate activities of ethnic minorities possessing both substantial financial resources and the capacity to generate stable income flows" (779). I had never thought about this difference before, but it's really significant! Aside from this, the article did a good job of showing how Chinese-American banks both enabled and benefited from the development and transformation of the Chinese ethnoburb of the San Gabriel Valley.

As a final note, I was really happy to see that Cheng grounded her article in a context of gender and sexuality. You can't really separate a study of race from a study of gender and sexuality. As she discusses, the influx of Chinese women immigrating to the US in the postwar era enabled the creation of the Chinese nuclear family (mirroring that of the white, American nuclear family), and played a key role in changing cultural perceptions of the Chinese-American community. And this idea of the traditional family has been a driving force in furthering white cultural and heterosexual norms in the U.S.

American Apartheid

Denton and Massey discuss overlapping issues of poverty, racism, and segregation in the context of U.S. history as well as its presence in current times. They link longstanding cycles of poverty among the "urban underclass" to the continuing consequences of residential segregation, itself a result of well-established processes and institutions that have lead to widespread structural discrimination.

They argue that residential segregation is not, as many might assume, caused by neutral market forces. Rather, it is a construction that has developed out of a tradition of white prejudice in the United States, however masked this prejudice may seem. Denton and Massey say, "Despite whites' endorsement of the ideal that people should be able to live wherever they can afford to regardless of race, a majority still feel uncomfortable in any neighborhood that contains more than a few black residents" (11).

This point really reminded me of Harris's discussion of white privilege. Though in theory, whites feel as though everyone should have the freedom to choose where they want to live, in practice, different feelings may come to light. The instinctual assumption that whites somehow have ownership of certain areas (that other minority groups then move "into") is exactly what we've been discussing in terms of the legacy of white privilege. Discomfort at the idea of racially integrated neighborhoods is a reaction to historical ideals of white, pure space.

Shapiro, in his articles, emphasizes the ways that structural discrimination stemming from this prejudice and privilege has very real and devastating economic effects on Black Americans and other people of color. His focus on the sub-prime mortgage crisis is certainly really relevant in the present moment. "The line from redlining to sub-prime is direct, as is the culpability" (A11). Shapiro and Oliver place blame on lenders who target communities of color with discriminatory practices, ultimately contributing to the creation of a national and definite "Black catastrophe."

White Privilege, or Modern Racism

Cheryl Harris's "Whiteness as Property" was a pretty hefty article with a strong historical context and many (mostly engaging and appropriate) examples including seminal court cases and U.S. law in practice. Her main claim is that, with roots in American practices of conquest and colonization, "whiteness" has become more than just a racial identity; it has become a form of property and a foundation for racialized (white) privilege. The development of whiteness as property and the persistence of its continuing legacy contribute to modern ideas and formulations of racism in U.S. society. Interestingly, Laura Pulido also discusses the social effects of white privilege, but in the context of environmental racism and geographic landscapes.

To be honest, I didn't immediately identify with Harris's connection between whiteness and property, but her argument, though lengthy, was well-written with a bevy of pertinent and tangible examples. Her observation that whiteness has an understood and highly prized, if not directly acknowledged, value in our society is certainly true. But the ways that she applied this with various studies, court cases, and historical events really backed up her claim that whiteness does indeed function as a modern (and status-related) form of property.

I think an important part of this argument is the fact that valuing whiteness inherently requires a devaluing of the "other" in order to perpetuate the ideas and practices of white privilege. Both whiteness and property are based on concepts of exclusion (isolating ownership of these entities for one's own), and our entire society operates on the assumption that this privilege should not be disturbed (as it would implicate an upheaval of sorts in almost every social relation that is constructed upon this privilege; that is, all social relations).

I found Harris's article to be more readable than Pulido's, which included discussion of many initially abstract concepts like intentionality and scale in an exploration of essentially, the production of environmental racism by both conscious effort (targeting of groups) and unconscious and broader social processes ("white flight", etc). I connected more deeply with Harris's discussion of white privilege as it affected (and effected) real policies concerning issues like affirmative action.

Nationalism and Illegal Alienage

Mai Ngai explores the historical trajectory of "illegal aliens" in terms of U.S. law and society. She draws connections between race and illegal status, building on many concepts from last week's readings (construction of racial ideologies and racialized spaces), while also contributing new and interesting claims of her own. She differentiates between legal aliens, illegal aliens, and "alien citizens" (more on that later). Kim and de Genova also refer to the ideas of Omi and Winant (Kim more explicitly) in their historical explorations of the racialization of Asians and Latinos in the U.S.

One of the main themes of Ngai's book Impossible Subjects is the role of U.S. immigration restrictions in the construction of modern ideas of race and citizenship - in particular, the development of current racial hierarchies. As she says, restrictive immigration policy "produced new categories of racial difference" (6); as such, "illegal alienage" is not, as many might think, a natural condition, but one that is very dependent on law, policy, and the exercise of sovereignty. I identified with her example of the racial formation of Asians as contingent on histories of "conquest and colonialism" (8), because I think this plays a huge role in the ways that Asian-Americans are viewed as a racial Other. Even though individuals may be U.S. citizens by birth, they can be assumed to be "foreign" or "other" by virtue of their racial categorization and affiliation with illegal immigration. This is the idea of the "alien citizen."

Ngai also includes a "globalist perspective" on immigration policy, noting that migration is a process that is bound by space and time, and mobilized by greater forces between nations and those in power. Particularly important is her emphasis on our understanding of immigration as wholly influenced by workings of nationalism and sovereignty. De Genova also discusses nationalism in the creation of an inherent racial identity, saying, “U.S. nationalism’s very appropriation for itself of ‘American’-ness as its exclusive ‘national’ identity could never be other than a European settler-state’s imperial gesture of usurpation” (5). This challenge to U.S. nationalism is the theme in this week’s reading that I found most thought-provoking. Especially in recent times, nationalism is often equated with pride in one’s country, and thus seems to be almost dangerous to question. De Genova and Ngai show us that it’s necessary to question what we often take for granted.

Human Geography and the Racialized Landscape

These first four readings largely centered on ideas of race as embedded in our spatial, cultural, and visual understanding of the world. I'm glad that Omi and Winant was the first. Though I had read "Racial Formation" previously, reading it in conjunction with the other three pieces offered a little more understanding. Their theory of racial formation is an alternative to conventional paradigms of race as it is viewed in the U.S. They argue that the state as an institution is inherently racial, just as Lipsitz, Schein, and Rojas argue that space and landscape are structured by racial ideas and ideologies.

I found the Schein article to be the most captivating, not only because I haven't read many studies of the normativity of landscape, but also for its focus on individual and collective perceptions of cultural landscapes. I appreciated Schein's theoretical discussion of landscape as a spatial, visual, AND material way of framing the world. He mentions the ideas of J.B. Jackson (whose humanistic approach is also noted by Rojas), namely that landscape is an organization of space, and to understand it, we must ask who owns, uses, creates, and changes this space. And not only that, but who does it affect? How does the process happen?

The idea of a human geography, imbued with a morality of sorts, is really interesting. Viewing the landscape as it's linked to our identities and "desires," not just for its aesthetic or profitability, shows that it is not just a byproduct of human activity, but as Jackson noted, "capable of providing for social change" (202). Lipsitz also discusses moral geography, exploring the American ideal of pure space and its manifestation in segregated residential areas. He takes on the rise of suburbia as the creation of a “white spatial imaginary.” This is particularly interesting in contrast to Rojas’s study of Latino suburbs in East LA, a different example of the racialization of a particular urban landscape.