Abstract
The wrenching stories of violence suffered by Indigenous women migrants at the hands of partners, traveling companions, gangs, cartels, and state border enforcement punctuate Shannon Speed’s Incarcerated Stories, but she stresses that these Indigenous women’s vulnerability is not the point. Instead, these stories of violence focus attention on the structures of power that render these women vulnerable to racialized and gendered forms of violence. Through rich, engaged ethnographic research conducted through visitation of Indigenous migrant women at the T. Don Hutto Immigration detention facility in Texas, Speed gathered stories of migrants from Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras who had made the journey to the United States. These “incarcerated” stories form the basis of her succinct and theoretically sophisticated analysis exploring the violence resulting from enduring settler colonial state power and the embrace of neoliberal capitalism.
By conducting an analysis that follows Indigenous migrant women’s journeys, Speed crosses conceptual and disciplinary boundaries. As part of the Critical Indigeneities series published by the University of North Carolina, the book is marketed to an audience of interdisciplinary scholars whose work centers Indigenous culture and political agency, but this book is clearly also about sovereignty, transnational migration, and gendered violence. Speed integrates literature on settler colonial state power with work on neoliberal capitalism, suturing these often-disconnected areas of study together through a relentless focus on the out-of-control I neoliberal market dynamics transforming settler states and the continued, compounded violence that ensues. Similarly, Speed’s attempts to clearly articulate how Indigeneity matters to these migrants’ stories links scholarship on Native North Americans and Native Central and South Americans, connections often obscured by disciplinary conventions. The descriptions of how US border enforcement casually erases Indigeneity by categorizing migrant women as “Mexican nationals” or “Guatemalan nationals” suggest how quickly, too, migration and border enforcement scholars can lose sight of the specificity of indigenous migrant experience. Despite the focus on connecting disparate strands of scholarship, Speed also maintains a focus on the distinctions among the migrants she encounters, and woven throughout the book are specific histories of Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, and the United States that highlight the different articulations of settler state ideology. Indigenous people, Speed shows, were differently racialized and differently incorporated within multicultural neoliberalism in each specific context, and her careful scholarship stresses the context-specific forms of violence in each place, from the dragging genocidal warfare of La Violencia in Guatemala to the rise of gang-dominated violence aboard the tren de la muerte (train of death) that Central American migrants use to traverse Mexico.
The book begins with an overview of Speed’s conceptual framework and her use of Indigenous women migrant’s stories as a prism to refract the structural violence that results from spiraling neoliberal multiculturalism embedded within longer histories of settler colonialism in Central America and the United States. Chapter Two focuses on the conditions that prompt Indigenous women migrants to leave Central America, and here Speed disentangles the distinctive forms of racial and gendered state violence in each country. In Chapter Three, the focus is on the migrant journey. Speed stresses the centrality of intersectional understandings of violence, where violence and lack of accountability are structural features of the settler state and compound the violence suffered by Indigenous migrant women. Chapter Four finds Indigenous migrant women in US immigration detention and details how carceral control is also central to settler state power, enforcing a racialized logic of belonging. In Chapter Five, Speed details how the constant threat of deportation manifests in Indigenous women migrants’ lives, even after they leave detention, rendering them more vulnerable to trafficking and abuse. Finally, Chapter Six makes a case for the utility of framing these experiences through the lens of settler colonialism: the settler state, Speed suggests, is designed to perpetuate violence and inequality, not just toward the dispossession and elimination of Indigenous people within its borders, but beyond them. To survive, in the face of such constant oppression, is a form of resistance.
Speed argues that Incarcerated Stories should not be understood as a book about migration, but rather as a book about the structures of power underpinning settler colonialism. Yet it is clear that this is a migration story and that migration and settler colonial ideologies are deeply entangled not just in the Americas, but in other geographic contexts as well. To understand migration as part of the settler colonial project is crucial for understanding the racialized, gendered, and deeply colonial and violent logics framing contemporary border enforcement and for understanding why migration has become such a contemporary global political crisis. Migration is a story of settler colonialism, of neoliberal capitalism, and of profound violence. This concise volume helps make that case and is ideally suited to accompany a critical investigation into migration in the social science undergraduate classroom, either through using stand-alone chapters or through assigning the short book as a whole.