Book Review: The Production of Phantoms and Exclusions

In Begging as a Path to Progress, Kate Swanson describes a conversation with a couple of indigenous girls from Calhuasi, an Andean community in Ecuador, as follows: “ ‘Do you have a cure for our faces?’ ‘What for?’ I inquired, suspecting she had some sort of skin problem. ‘To be more white’ she replied. ‘Why?’ I asked, startled by her response. ‘Because we are black. We need it’ ” (2010: 72). The girls’ desire to find a cure for their dark skin reflects the current efforts to “cleanse”—read “whiten”—Quito and Guayaquil’s urban spaces of street beggars and undesired indigenous bodies. Maybe if these girls were “more white”—if they did not have the “disease” of the wrong skin color and its related class position—they could keep working in the streets to pay for their education and to achieve some upward mobility (or this is their hope). In the fantasies of Ecuador’s planners, if they could get rid of the “disease”—if they could erase migrant indigenous existence from the streets—they could attract more tourists to their economy. In practice, what Neil Smith has called the “revanchist city” turns indigenous migrants into phantoms. As Bianet Castellanos puts it, “Ghosts draw attention to cultural practices and histories that have been denied, suppressed, or erased by modernity’s violence” (2010: xxi). Retrieving those histories is a crucial academic and political project. Four recent ethnographies address some of these silences.

From a geographic perspective, Kate Swanson analyzes the dynamics of migrant children and their families in the Calhuasí-Quito-Guayaquil circuit, focusing on begging and selling gum in Ecuador’s urban spaces. She effectively discusses the different forms of exclusion, inequality, racism, and discrimination suffered by indigenous migrants in Ecuador’s urban spaces. Relations of race are particularly salient in that they inhibit Calhuaseños’ possibilities for upward mobility and participation in consumer culture. Projects like removing beggars from cities reveal the construction of indigenous people as dirty, lazy, and disposable. These racial displacements both remove people from space and deprive them of their livelihoods. Because agriculture does not offer means of survival and children’s possibilities for going to school are increasingly limited, leaving the streets means being driven to transnational migration.

Contrary to popular and humanitarian views, Swanson argues, begging is a path to progress. While being careful to highlight the structural relations that have located these indigenous children in such marginal positions since colonial times and pushing for an agenda to resolve the problems of indigenous poverty and exclusion, she points out that these children would have no way of paying for their education if it were not for begging. According to Swanson, begging demonstrates resilience. Women reject jobs as domestic workers on the basis of experiences of exploitation and sexual violence. In the street, in contrast, they are watched by relatives and other members of the community, and they can control their own movements. They refuse to enter an ethnically segmented labor market that would alienate them and prevent them from going to school. Instead, they actively appropriate the discourses of their gendered and racialized roles as submissive Indians and capitalize on them to promote their own well-being.

Bianet Castellanos, in A Return to Servitude, shifts our attention to one of the most important tourist attractions in Latin America, Cancún, by revealing its phantoms—the stories behind modernization and development projects that are violently experienced in the everyday lives of Mayans from Kuchimil (a pseudonym). Her longitudinal ethnography analyzes the intersections of global capital, tourism, and the reworking of Mayan identity while compellingly arguing that, rather than being at the margins of global capital, indigenous migrants constitute one of the most important engines for the tourist industry and the service sector. This recentering of migrants in the global economy repositions indigeneity as fluid and contextual rather than static: “Although indigeneity may be presumed to be the antithesis of the global, it is constituted through the transnational” (2010: xxxii).

Castellanos asks the question: Who pays the costs of modernity? And her discussion makes clear that it is indigenous people, who have been displaced from colonial times to the current era of global capitalism, particularly since 1992, when the government of Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari modified agrarian law and opened the opportunity for privatizing land. In combination with the North American Free Trade Agreement, the reform drastically affected Mexican agriculture and left thousands of people (many of them indigenous) without means of survival except for migration to cities and to the United States. In the present, their exclusion and marginality is reflected in the poverty of the areas in which they live. The government’s lack of response after hurricane Wilma, as opposed to the very fast recovery and huge investment in the case of Cancún’s main hotels and tourist areas, is a clear example of the inequalities experienced by Mayans. Castellanos shows that these indigenous people are the invisible motors of Cancún’s service economy and that places like Kuchimil bear the costs of reproducing the labor force. Indigenous communities are not only marginalized but also drained and exploited.

Castellanos argues that while Mayan workers are controlled and disciplined through different technologies, they use these same forms of discipline to maintain their community networks and resist the individuation embedded in neoliberal organizations of work. The use of ATMs is one of the very original examples she provides. ATMs allow government agencies to control workers by obtaining information on their bank accounts and the ways in which they spend their money, but for Mayans they have become a tool for strengthening community ties as workers give their cards to relatives and their use facilitates the flow of remittances. Through these remittances, migrants can continue contributing to their households and to projects in their home communities.

Daniela Oliver Ruvalcaba and Cristian Torres Robles’s multisited ethnography of the transnational community of San Juan Mixtepec in Oaxaca, Florida, California, and Virginia speaks to a larger audience than that of academia. Their ethnography, Excluidos y ciudadanos, is designed as a diagnosis of community dynamics and problems, with the goal of speaking to the members of the community as well as to policy makers thinking about migration. Although they do not use the language of “phantoms,” Oliver and Torres expose the myopic understanding of indigenous communities in Mexico and the United States and its effects in limiting access to well-being and creating systems of transnational exclusion. Of particular salience is their discussion of health, in which they expose the paradoxes and contradictions confronted by migrants who constantly move from the scope of one welfare system to that of another and who, although seen as tools for the development of the Mexican economy and as central to U.S. agriculture and service sectors, do not benefit from either. The authors’ treatment of exclusion is complemented by an analysis of the ways in which Mixtepequenses negotiate citizenship in a multiplicity of contexts and dimensions—what they call an “archipelago of citizenships.”

They also focus on cultural dynamics in the localities of settlement and community dynamics of transnational political citizenship in relation to the indigenous cargo (office) system. A fascinating part of this section is the description of the tensions generated within the community as migrants decided to take the figure of the patron saint with them to California. The idea was to use the saint in reproducing the celebration of one of the most important rituals of the community. Many people opposed the idea, arguing that moving the saint to California would mean adding another cargo to the local governance system. After multiple negotiations, the community decided to send the saint, but only if it was delivered by the local authorities. Without visas, the authorities could not cross to California, and the saint had to be received in Tijuana. The final destination was a local church in Lamont—an alternative that also had to be negotiated within the community and with the local members of the church. With this description, the authors introduce the ways in which transcultural citizenship is negotiated in relation to California but also within the transnational community, where young members seek to be included in decision making with ideas and experiences derived from their lives in the United States.

The creation of hometown associations in the United States and the introduction of ideas on politics and development from the migrant perspective have had a great influence on San Juan Mixtepec’s cargo system, making it more democratic and incorporating people formerly excluded, such as women and youth, into the making of decisions and the discussion of community affairs across borders. These transformations have materialized in a wide variety of community projects aiming to improve the living conditions of Mixtepequenses in Oaxaca and in the United States, but, as the authors emphasize, the lack of articulation between projects and the contested ideas of what community members need in the different localities where they reside have slowed down the process of capitalizing on the economic, intellectual, and physical efforts of locals and migrants. Despite these problems, Mixtepequenses have managed to develop strong political consciousness, and Oliver and Torres’s description shows that ethnicity and reliance on their indigenous organization have been central to this process.

Sarah England’s Afro–Central Americans in New York City centers on the transnational dynamics between Limón, Honduras, and New York City by looking at Garifuna families and forms of organization (2006: 226):

Like Mixtec migrants in California who find themselves doubly discriminated against by the racism in U.S. society and that of their fellow Mexican transmigrants, Garifuna are in the double bind of being constructed outside U.S. nationalism (and therefore they focus on their country of origin) and yet being divided by absolutist notions of race and ethnicity among Hondurans. In this double bind, Garifuna, like the Mixtec, have developed a political consciousness around an ethnic rather than a national identity. Unlike the Mixtec, however, this political consciousness must engage with not two but five different nation-states and nationalisms.

England turns to imperial and colonial dynamics in an effort to explain the current migration of Garifuna from Limón. She traces their history to their ethnogenesis, when African maroons mixed with the Island Caribs of Saint Vincent. In 1797 the British exiled the Garifuna to Central America, spreading them throughout villages in Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Their migration to the United States started around 1940, when men were recruited to the U.S. merchant marine, and they eventually settled in port cities like San Francisco and New York, places to which they still migrate. The history of the Garifuna, like that of other indigenous and maroon groups, is one of dispersal and dispossession, processes that inform their current dynamics as transnational communities. In particular, Garifuna have been affected by land expropriations that have been justified in terms of the stereotype of fun-loving blacks who make babies and dance rather than productive people in poverty. These racialized forms of dispossession highlight the tensions of the policies of mestizaje and the contradictions between blackness and indigenismo. As England points out, the Garifuna pose a challenge to established conceptions of race, ethnicity, and nationalism; they do not fit Honduran imaginaries and systems of classification, being neither black nor indigenous but a combination of these and other diasporic identities. The productive question, then, is how these ambiguities are mobilized at different moments and by different actors to include and exclude Garifuna people in Honduras and the United States.

England shows that diasporic groups and transnational communities have complex historical formations that often impact the ways in which current identities are constructed and performed. In the case of the Garifuna, we observe three layers of belonging—African, Central American, and Garifuna—and multiple forms of identification constructed in relation to different contexts and political agendas (black, indigenous, Latino, Honduran, Belizean, Guatemalan, Nicaraguan, North American, Central American, and Caribbean). According to England, these multiple identifications make the Garifuna a particular case: their identifications are contentious within the group. Her main argument is that the differences within the transnational community result from the different local contexts in which Limoneños are settled, embedded in divergent racial, class, and ethnic systems that often contradict one another.

England’s attention to Garifuna grassroots organizations and their tensions stresses the location of indigenous migrants in two different class positions: independent entrepreneurs in Honduras and working poor in New York. These differences affect Limoneños’ views about migration and their organizations and political agendas. Some equate migration with progress, while others see it as causing double marginalization. The latter emphasize what they call the Garifuna welfare system, an ironic comment that highlights the increasing dependence on remittances and the lack of attention and support from the state. This so-called welfare system, along with those from Mixtepec, Kuchimil, and Calhuasí, exposes the neglect by Latin American states of their indigenous peoples, phantoms sustaining themselves, and many mestizo and American economies with their cheap, docile, and flexible labor power.

With their own specificities, these books highlight that indigenous migrations have to be understood as results of colonial and neocolonial processes of domination, racism, and exclusion. As racialized subjects, indigenous migrants are subject to multiple inequalities and exclusions as they move away from their local communities and transit through different systems of racial, class, gender, and ethnic classifications that often contradict each other. These movements make them vulnerable, but they are resilient and have found ways of navigating through their exclusions by relying on their internal forms of organization and solidarity, such as family ties, community governments, and other forms of social and political solidarity. Although these strategies do not constitute solutions, they do offer alternatives for survival in the face of global and national inequalities.

Migration often appears as a double bind: on the one hand it offers possibilities to communities and individuals, and on the other it becomes the source of internal conflicts and tensions that threaten collective solidarity. The challenge for indigenous migrants is to convert the tensions and transformations into sources of empowerment, and the challenge for policy makers and scholars is to reveal the processes that produce phantoms and exclusions and address indigenous particularities and problems in their own terms. It is not up to indigenous people to develop alternative welfare systems, and we must be careful, in celebrating their agency and resilience, not to obscure the urgency of attending to their needs from the position of governments and other dominant powers.