economicmigrants

It feels like I had a big fight yesterday and left a boxing ring. I was in a fight with a canon of knowledge, it felt like a big encyclopaedia of epistemological nationalisms was flying over me, right to my face, it felt like a fight with a bunch of white women, my mom represented by these other women who didn’t need to aspire being white, who simply were. A Professor calling me out, bringing me out of my theoretical and national closet, to tell others where I was really from, the language I really spoke and which color my passport had. Because otherwise, I was ‘denying’ my origins, selling out, being ashamed of being X.

It’s ultimately a strategy of subversion that has worked for generations and for lots of co-marginalized folks. Undocumented migrants in the US are advised by migrant associations to, when facing ICE, not to tell where they are from. Oftentimes, Frontex et co. has to organize several deportation flights for one asylum-seeker because they do not know where the asylum-seeker is really from. They just see a given ethnicity/race, the passport is gone, then you have to start that good old migration charade. Biomedical tests and X-ray to assess the age of the réquerant d’asile and possibly delegate him or her any rights of breathing this European air; linguistic tests ‘with one of your kind’ who ‘speaks the local (read: field, native) language’ to see where the hell you are really from.

Funny to think how I might have touched a scholarly nerve and how my own damaged nerve hurt more than at any other day, one of those days of visceral pain.

I always thought defying the boundaries of whiteness was the dangerous, unwanted thing to do. That there was a space for transgression and challenging hegemonic ways of thinking, behaving and being. If not for the cultural revaluation of signs and symbols, at least for the mere (!) economic redistribution. But then again, I come from Latin America, I should know that this is how white supremacy works best, and how it is most effective: when the (privileged, domesticated) racialized Other agrees on trespassing and subjugating to a white-dominated society, when s/he even emulates the expected professional habitus, dominates the coded language and carries European (read: white) names on. Politicas de embranquecimento 2.0., millenial version.

It is open-heart-surgery to do this research, absolutely. I am struck by its ability to affect my own materiality, my emotional state, my insomnia. How much it drives me crazy in non-metaphorical ways, and the heaviness of the emotions that are released by it. I’ve been thinking of this picture of me, legitimizing my unwanted and ‘voluntary’ presence in Europe previously through a temporary renting of my brain to Multi-Kulti Berlin and international Geneva, currently renting out my possibly functioning uterus to Lady Freedom&Helvetia and desperately trying to shape my brain to fit the model of the Anglo-Saxon research industrial complex. And how this willingness and ability to pass comes from a willingness to integrate into my own nuclear family and its whitening aspirations; how it came to create a person who sought almost desperately to compensate her brownness, circulating in white-universities in Europe, with the strategy of a choose-and-pick blank European name, to be ultimately, even accepted by her own family.

I’m reading “Whiteness as Property” by Cheryl I. Harris on the processes of racial passing in the United States and I found this amazing quote that sums up so much of what I am feeling now:

“Every day my grandmother rose from her bed in her house in a Black enclave on the south side of Chicago, sent her children off to a Black school, boarded a bus full of Black passengers, and rode to work. No one at her job ever asked if she was Black; the question was unthinkable. By virtue of the employment practices of the “fine establishment” in which she worked, she could not have been. Catering to the upper-middle class, understated tastes required that Blacks not be allowed.

She quietly went about her clerical tasks, not once revealing her true identity. She listened to the women with whom she worked discuss their worries – their children’s illnesses, their husbands’ disappointments, their boyfriends’ infidelities – all of the mundane yet critical things that made up their lives She came to know them but they did not know her, for my grandmother occupied a completely different place. That place – where white supremacy and economic domination meet – was unknown turf to her white co-workers. They remained oblivious to the worlds within worlds that existed just beyond the edge of their awareness and yet were present in their very midst.

Each evening, my grandmother, tired and worn, retracted her steps home, laid aside her mask, and reentered herself. Day in and day out, she made herself invisible, then visible again, for a price too inconsequential to do more than barely sustain her family and at a cost too precious to conceive. She left the job some years later, finding the strain too much to bear.

From time to time, as I later sat with her, she would recollect that period, and the cloud of some painful memory would pass across her face. Her voice would remain subdued as if to contain the still remembered tension. On rare occasions she would wince, recalling some particularly racist comment made in her presence because of her presumed, shared group affiliation. Whatever retort might have been called for had been suppressed long before it reached her lips, for the price of her family’s well-being was her silence. Accepting the risk of self-annihilation was the only way to survive.

Although she never would have stated it this way, the clear and ringing denunciations of racism she delivered from her chair and ringing denunciations of racism she delivered from her chair when advanced arthritis had rendered her unable to work were informed by those experiences. The fact that self-denial had been a logical choice and had made her complicit in her own oppression at times fed the fire in her eyes when she confronted some daily outrage inflicted on Black people.” (1711-2)

I was thinking about this first time in Paris, where I was sitting alone in this café and the serveur asked me straight from the moment when he first saw me and came to my table, where I was from. I told him this was a very intimate question, akin to ‘What’s your favorite sexual position?’ And his reaction.

The importance (and the guts) of not wanting to tell you, random stranger, where I am from, in a Europe of Saharian borders, post-debates sur fill-in identité(s) national(es), whereas you know I am not ‘from here,’ you can hear it in my accent, you can see it on my skin. And yet, you are going to have to guess, I might be Thai or Latin American, or a mix of Chinese, or maybe another métisse who grew up elsewhere. You can only see some ‘autochtonous’ Indian blood and that’s probably all you are going to get. I will not give you my geopolitical GPS that will be automatically translated into discursive colonization. (Trinh Miinh-Ha 1987) Despite the heavily armed soldiers on the streets of Paris and the état d’émergence. The power of denying access to these public secrets, when I remember his appalled face and the discomfort that this created yesterday, I know I am on the right track.