the mouth of the wolf

In her novel Caramelo (Random House, Inc, 2002), Sandra Cisneros follows the life of Celaya Reyes, whose family crosses the border annually between Chicago and Mexico City; the story spans multiple timelines as well as cities, jumping back and forth between spaces and the memories they inspire. In Celaya's world, the border between the US and Mexico is rife with visceral sensations; "Sweets sweeter, colors brighter, the bitter more bitter," she explains as her family crosses into Mexico (17). Mexico becomes a country of synergy, where indigenous mythologies mesh with Catholic tradition, Spanish blood mixes with Indian, and the truth becomes conflated with lies. America (and specifically Chicago), on the other hand, is a cold place, dusty, and gray. When the Reyes family moves to San Antonio, a city closer to the Mexican border, tensions arise between Celaya, who, though she was born in the US, has frequently traveled to Mexico, and the other Mexican American girls at her school, who take pride in their Chicana identity:

Is hell Cookie Cantú and her yappy perras talking shit like, —Brown Power! Making fists and chanting, —Viva la raza. Or, —I'm Chicana and proud, wha'chu wanna do about it, pendeja? [...] When they catch me alone, —Bitch! Pretending like you're Spanish and shit. [...] They call me bolilla when they cross my path, or worse, gabacha. Who wants to be called a white girl? I mean, not even white girls want to be called white girls. (354)

The animosity between Celaya and Cookie is particularly striking in relation to Nicholas de Genova's text "Locating a Mexican Chicago in the Space of the U.S. Nation-State," in which de Genova discusses the transnational practices of Mexican migrants as well as the Chicano/a population living in Chicago. For example, de Genova discusses the contributions of a man named Felipe, who raised money in his community to send back to the family of a murdered man in his small, poor hometown; thus the presence of Mexico among the migrants in Chicago is both an abstract and tangible reality.

In his book An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton University Press, 2001), Hamid Nafici discusses three distinct forms of what he terms "accented cinema": the exilic, the diasporic, and the ethnic. To paraphrase, the exilic deals with the "then" and "there," the diasporic with the "there" and "now," and the ethnic with the "here" and "now." What they all have in common, though, is a profound understanding of "the tensions of marginality and difference [...] liminal subjectivity and interstitial location in society..." (10). In other words, "accented filmmakers," despite the vast differences in the films they create (e.g. The Joy Luck Club, El Norte, etc.), all share a specific interweaving of time and space, in which the characters pine for a lost home, or try to combine their past with their present.

Similarly, the transnational subjects of de Genova's text and Aihwa Ong's text, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (discussing Chinese, specifically Hong Kong, migrants in the US), inhabit a liminal space between nations, in which they simultaneously belong to and are foreign to two separate but interconnected nations. Ong writes, "Although citizenship is conventionally thought of as based on political rights and participation within a sovereign state, globalization has made economic calculation a major element in diasporan subjects' choice of citizenship, as well as in the ways nation-states redefine immigration laws." (112) Indeed, the relationship between economy and citizenship remains a focal point in both Ong and de Genova's texts: laborers and professionals often migrate to the US to make money, which they use to support relatives in their home country, or in some cases attempt to save to invest in real estate in their home country. (Interestingly, Cisneros' novel flips this narrative: after the Little Grandfather dies, the Awful Grandmother sells her house in Mexico City and, later, helps her family buy real estate in Texas.)

Again, gender roles are important as well. Ong writes, "the masculine subjectivity of this elite diasporan community is defined primarily in terms of the individual's role as a father or a son, that is, his role in maintaining the paternal/filial structure that both nurtures and expands family wealth." (126) De Genova: "[Felipe's] explanation of his own decision to migrate ... [is] meaningfully framed in terms of the responsibilities of the patriarchal male role as 'head of a family.'" (133) In Caramelo, it is the Awful Grandmother's three sons who migrate to Chicago to work, while her daughter stays in Mexico; the Little Grandfather and his father also at certain points in their lives lived and worked in the US as well. While women are not absent from the migrant narrative, it is the men whose labor is focal; their societal role as breadwinners in different but similar ways motivate, and perhaps even allow, them to cross borders in order to gain more money to support their families.

reproductive landscape

In her book Golden Gulag, Ruth Wilson Gilmore discusses in depth the politicization of women in anti-prison campaigns, a phenomenon that convolutes the gendered social constructions of the "male, or public, sphere" (194) and the female, or private. Both Gilmore and Julie Sze specifically highlight the organization of mothers seeking justice, creating discourses of the domestic and the political; we are all familiar with the feminist slogan: "The personal is political." In these cases the personal is the familial, the relationship between mothers and their children, who are unequally exposed to environmental pollution (as Sze writes about) or strict policing (Gilmore).

Writing specifically about the group Mothers Reclaiming Our Children (ROC), Gilmore brings attention to the ways in which the language of families and motherhood serves as a unifying force to mobilize women with similar and dissimilar experiences towards a single cause. Gilmore quotes Barbara Meredith, the mother of a black youth shot down by LAPD police and eventual co-founder of Mothers ROC: "Our mothers had taught us everything. And our grandmothers, and our aunts, and the ladies next door. They all taught us so we could have a better life." (198) Later, Gilmore writes, discussing the increasing Latina membership of ROC, "Mothers...Wives...Grandmothers...Indeed, the Black and Brown cadres of abuelas began to hold occasisional caucuses." (226) Here we see a specific kind of formulation, a conflation of gender and race: not only are these people women, they are women of color, and mostly working class or poor; though their experiences differ, their triple disenfranchisement unifies them in very particular ways, so that they draw upon the similarities of their roles as mothers and as racialized people and as economically disadvantaged people.

Furthermore, the centrality of children, not just mothers, becomes rhetorically and politically significant. In a 1995 flyer, Mothers ROC write: "Mothers suffer a special pain when their children are incarcerated (lost to them)." (quoted in Gilmore, 196, emphasis added) The use of semantics—the fact that the objective definition of "incarceration" has little to do with the loss of one's children—reimagines the politics of imprisonment, shifting the focus on the relationship between criminality and society to the relationship between mother and child. Thus the public politics of imprisonment becomes domesticized, which allows the Mothers ROC agenda to become relatable: this is not a battle to save some impersonal and faraway idea of "criminals," but rather to save children, and to reunite families. The very name "Mothers Reclaiming Our Children" is significant on multiple levels: it brings this mother-child dynamic to the forefront; it places women in a politically active role; and it asserts that they are reclaiming, a term that is historically loaded with the politics of race, gender, and sexuality, e.g. the reclamation of language, in which non-normative groups of people take and use pejorative words to disempower them of hatred and reempower them with affirmation.

The film Prison Town, USA similarly shifts focus to the family, although mostly highlighting the relationships between men, who have either been incarcerated or employed by a prison, and their wives and children. Although the film does offer a humanized view of those affected by the prison system, I took issue with the invisibility of minorities (although there were black guards in the training camp, all four central families/individuals were white; of course, this is not to say their struggles are illegitimate, and the film does problematize issues of class and wealth, but as [I believe, but can't remember right now] Cheryl Harris points out, working class whites are more likely to ignore the similar experience of working class minorities, focusing instead on the differences of race rather than the similarities of class) and, in retrospect, after having read Gilmore, I noticed that the film also plays into dominant gender roles. While there were female guards present, the film focuses on four men who have been directly affected by the prisons, propelling them to the "public sphere," while their wives are present only in the domestic; we see how the women have been affected too, but not how they fight against the system, or whether they are even able to do so. The only public female figure was the woman at Crossroads, whose job centered around the domestic (helping families of convicts to find shelter and housing).

state of exception

Two years ago, when I took my first class in APA, a classmate said that he had never learned about Japanese internment in high school, had never known about it since college. Certain histories are ignored, erased, and conveniently forgotten: because how can we explain such gross violations of human rights and still believe in an ideal of American as an exceptional state when, really, it's a state of exception?

When we discuss concentration camps we think of Nazi Germany, images of evil dictatorships committing inconceivable acts of genocide. Racism on a grand scale. But racism removed from us, by time or place, things we think can never occur in our country, or our time. Yet in times of war, the boundaries of nations and national law become blurred, and (racial) difference becomes a marker of disloyalty. Racial profiling and internment of Japanese Americans in the 1940s or of Muslims in the present day create paradoxes of citizenship and foreignness, forming what Mae Ngai calls "alien citizens": those who are caught in a liminal non-space between belonging and not belonging.

Amy Kaplan frames Guantánamo Bay in a similar way: "Where in the world is Guantánamo?" she asks; "...to ask about the location of Guantánamo is to ask: where in the world is the United States?" (832) If the history of Guantánamo as a place caught between nations, both belonging and not belonging to both the United States and Cuba, then it also becomes an apt metaphor for the place of its detainees, who are and are not citizens of the United States, are and are not aliens. The creation of legal categories like "unincorporated territories" echoes Ngai's "alien citizens," conflating physical/legal spaces with physical/legal bodies. What better place to house undefinable subjects than in undefinable territories?

sexist/racist environmentalism

I wanted to be an environmentalist at one point in my life: romantic aspirations of saving the planet inspired me, at one point, to consider (double) majoring in environmental studies; but, when I took my first college course in environmental science, something seemed wrong. It wasn't the subject matter itself, which I had already studied in high school and really loved learning about. My excuse was that double majoring would have been too restrictive on my electives, but in reality I knew it had something to do with the other students in the class, the other people in the major. Was it that they shared the same dreams, thought they could save the world too, but that their dreams seemed superficial, phony even, and made me doubt my own?

I think, after reading Andrea Smith's chapter "Rape of the Land," I have realized at least partially the answer: sitting in a classroom of mostly well-to-do, white students, I understood to some level that "environmentalism" to a certain extent meant privilege. For example, the privilege of industry leads to lower birth rates; pre-industrial and developing countries have high birth rates (and of course "developing country" is code for non-Western). The privilege of industry also leads to astronomical increases of pollution and actually, in the short term, population bursts (here's the timeline: a pre-industrial nation has a high birth rate but also a high death rate. First come medical technologies that lower the death rate; the birth rate is still high, leading to high populations. Eventually contraceptive technologies and sex education lower the birth rate, but slowly and only after the population boom). Indeed, Smith confirms that "the population of India was stable until the advent of British colonialism" (70).

I understood that many of my classmates, and myself included, came from privileged backgrounds, could afford to go to NYU, could afford to discuss things like food chains and strip mining, could afford to say we'll protect the environment when really we had no idea what protecting the environment really meant. We came from suburbia, did not grow up next door to a nuclear power plant, were not subjected to the effects of atomic bomb testings. We grew up eating meat and throwing away too much trash and leaving the light on too long, and only cared when we found out it was "wrong," or, more accurately, that it was supposed to be "wrong," i.e. that we were supposed to care.

The sensationalization of the environment and environmental problems has turned it into such a fad, an easy way to "do something right" without understanding the deeper implications or more institutional causes. For example, one time in Midtown I saw a giant, electric billboard that tallied the real-time production of carbon dioxide; but how much waste and pollution was created in producing and constructing that sign, how much energy wasted keeping it running 24/7? The environment has become the go-to cause for all kinds of pseudo-political celebrity activism, a way for people to be recognized for their "noble" efforts while glossing over what is really at stake. Take, for example, the Aryan Women's League (a white supremacist and homophobic organization): "The way to [gain public legitimacy] is to make ourselves known as environmentalists and wildlife advocates" (quoted in Smith, 77). The thought of hate groups using environmental activism as a facade to gain recognition is sickening.

Yet embedded into much of the discourse of environmentalism is hate, "what Betsy Hartmann calls 'the greening of hate'" (quoted in Smith, 69). Though we have already looked at the ways in which communities of color are disproportionately targeted for environmentally dangerous facilities, Smith reveals the marginalization of women and people of color in environmental activism. Specifically (and this is why I brought up earlier the relationship between industrialization and birth rate) the rhetoric of overpopulation as a major environmental problem belies male- and white-dominated politics: immigrant women from third world (and thus inherently racialized) countries are often cast as the problem population in such discourse, seen as "having too many children." Thus they become vilified when they are in fact disenfranchised people, the victims (not the culprits) of national and global structures of inequality and colonialism. Third world nations are, in the view of some populationist groups, responsible for overpopulation; but, Smith points out, these views ignore the giant disparity between the over-consumption of developed, post-industrial nations, and the much more modest consumption of developing nations: "there is actually enough food produced in the world to sustain every person at a 3,000-calorie-per-day diet. However, land is used inefficiently in order to support livestock for environmentally unsustainable Western meat-based diets" (71, emphasis added). Furthermore, "poverty, starvation, environmental degradation, and overpopulation are the direct result of specific colonial practices" (71).

The title of the chapter, "Rape of the Land," acts to draw a parallel between land and the environment with the body as a kind of space. Smith discusses specific, and more literal, ties between the land and the body in the form of the radiation of bomb testing, which pollutes both land and body; thus the physical body and the physical land become intertwined, so that, cliche as it is, "Rape of the Land" is a surprisingly apt metaphor to describe the multiple ways in which pollution and other environmental problems affect people and their property. When the land is violated, so is the body.

I end with a quote that continues to haunt me, though it is mostly irrelevant to the rest of my response: discussing the effects of severe atomic bomb testing in the Marshall Islands, which have caused extreme birth defects and health issues, "Some communities have decided to stop reproducing and go extinct" (69).

"You begin to understand that you are less." -Carlos Padilla

When people of color have been historically characterized with a language of infection and contamination (e.g. the "one-drop" rule), the politicization of garbage and pollution then becomes a politicization of race and racism. In her book Noxious New York, Julie Sze writes, "during the summer of 1968, black youths burned garbage as an expression of their rage and anger" (50); the burning of garbage acts as a rejection of racist, hegemonic structures that not only site environmentally dangerous buildings in neighborhoods of color but also that equate the people living in those neighborhoods with garbage.

Laura Pulido discusses the role of intent in cases of environmental racism and, in particular, attempts to dispel the popular conception of racism as individual actions driven by the intent to disadvantage people of color. Pulido asserts that racism should be understood, instead, as actions that have been influenced or made possible by the history of oppression in the United States, and which further propagate oppression. This reading of racism is especially useful in studying the debates around environmental racism; indeed, Sze mentions multiple times the role of neglect, as opposed to intent. In other words, while acts of environmental racism may not have been born of conscious decisions to harm neighborhoods of color, the fact that these neighborhoods have been neglected by the government, which in turn has allowed them to be targeted, still constitutes a form of racism.

Furthermore, the absence of a community voice in decision-making relegates those who actually reside in the affected neighborhood to a subjugated role. Sze quotes Robert Caro: "Once the avenue had been a place for people; Robert Moses made it a place for cars." (86) Here we see the erasure of the personal voice, the denial of residents in the community, who are replaced by transitory cars passing through the neighborhood. The erasure of the personal is precisely what allows these acts of racism to occur, what allows people of color to become associated with, equated with, garbage, so that the burning of garbage is not just an act of resistance against the government for allowing these things to happen, but an act of resistance against the stripping of the voices of the disempowered. The politics of garbage is not just a politics of the environment and of welfare, but also a politics of power and identity.