Abstract
On a chilly morning in February 2020, I walked up to the JFK Federal Building, a concrete complex located diagonally across Boston City Hall. I was there to accompany Tomás Carlos Jimenez 1 during an immigration hearing on behalf of the Boston Immigration Justice Accompaniment Network (BIJAN), an abolitionist immigration justice organization. Having grown up in Central America, Tomás had no adult family members in the United States and thus requested moral and technical support from a BIJAN accompanier. As we sat on the hard wooden pews for hours waiting for his case to be called, I watched the judge conduct two bond hearings. The first was for Juan Flores Dominguez, a 67-year-old man from a Caribbean island who had lived in the United States since 2003 and had many family members in New England. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) attorney told the judge that Juan had been arrested in a car with other undocumented individuals in January and that the police had found some fraudulent documents and a small amount of cocaine in the vehicle. Juan had not been charged with a crime, but he was taken into Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody, his house was searched, and he had been detained ever since.
As a long-term resident without a history of criminalization, 2 Juan was automatically eligible for bond according to the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). Yet the DHS attorney stressed the need for a high bond. Juan’s attorney reassured the judge that he had been employed since 2003, his extended family lived in New England and had written multiple letters of support, and his nephew would house and accompany him to all hearings. The judge remained unconvinced and asked whether all his family members had legal status. When Juan’s attorney replied “yes,” the judge set a high bond of 5,000 USD and asked if Juan would pay it that day. When the attorney confirmed that his family would pay immediately, the judge released Juan on bond, much to the 67-year-old’s palpable relief.
The second bond hearing concerned Aleksandras Savickas, a 20-year-old Eastern European man who the police had pulled over for driving without a license. Discovering that he had overstayed his visa, they referred him to ICE and released him on his own reconnaissance. The same DHS attorney represented the US government in this case, but the tenor of the proceeding was different. The attorney argued that Aleksandras did not represent a danger to the community because he had “limited” history of criminalization. As a recent arrival in 2017, he was not automatically eligible for relief, but the attorney stated that the government was willing to release him on high bond. Aleksandras’s attorney argued that he should be given bond because he had an engineering degree and was in a serious relationship with a US citizen. Furthermore, his brother was a mechanical engineer in New Jersey and earned “a substantial salary in the six figures.” The judge asked no questions, except to clarify that the letter from the US citizen did not mention a romantic relationship with Aleksandras and set the bond at 6,000 USD.
The course of these bond hearings felt familiar to me as a regular court accompanier and scholar of migration. The traffic stop-to-deportation pipeline (Smith et al. 2021) had played out as expected for both Juan and Aleksandras: Traffic stops led them to ICE and the court and would likely lead to deportation. While Juan was detained, the traffic police referred Aleksandras to ICE, who did not detain him. In court, the DHS attorney did not paint Aleksandras as a danger to the community. The judge posed no questions about his family members’ legal status, his employment, or his moral character before releasing him on bond. The seeming anomalies of Aleksandras’s case, however, are a testament to the coloniality of the US immigration system.
Aníbal Quijano, the Peruvian sociologist, lifelong activist, and prolific public speaker who is the subject of this symposium began to develop his perspective of the coloniality of power in the late 1980s, coincident with the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall (Walsh, Mignolo, and Segato 2024). Coloniality of power is an enduring and global structure that began when colonialists on Iberian ships arrived on the shores of Caribbean islands and Abya Yala. 3 Their subsequent projects of colonization hinged on two historical processes: the invention of race, which codified the supposedly natural, biological differences between the colonizers and the colonized and firmly established the colonized as inferior; and the institution of a new structure for the control of labor, resources, and products. These two aspects have since become “the fundamental axes of the new model of power” (Quijano 2024:256) that continues to structure our epistemic assumptions, subjectivities, and material conditions.
Aleksandras’s anomalous journey through the traffic stop-to-deportation pipeline does not look quite so anomalous when we view it through the lens of coloniality of power. In court, Aleksandras’s Europeanness was indexed to whiteness, which rendered his claims of moral and intellectual superiority and economic stability legible and believable to the DHS attorney and the judge. Similarly, the traffic police who stopped Aleksandras for driving without a license believed that he would attend his court hearings if released and did not detain him. During my two years as a court accompanier, I watched many judges and DHS attorneys assign moral worthiness and economic wherewithal to multiple Eastern and Southern European immigrant respondents, which stood in stark contrast to the automatic assumptions about moral degeneracy, criminal threat, and economic indigency that these same officers of the court made about immigrants from the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. As Lucy Mayblin (2018) and Fiorenza Picozza (2021) have argued, the coloniality of power perspective elucidates why and how political and administrative elites in Western Europe sort migrants, asylum-seekers, and refugees into hierarchies of beings and translate race and countries of origin into deservingness for asylum, the right to stay, and the right to be human. I would argue that their insights apply equally to Tomás, Juan, and other non-white immigrants appearing in court. József Böröcz (2006) and Manuela Boatcă (2006, 2010), on the other hand, link coloniality to the questionable Europeanness/whiteness of Eastern Europeans, which explains not only their occasional appearances in the Boston immigration court and eventual deportation but also the comparative smoothness of their journey through the immigration system.
In my dissertation titled “the Connected History of Refugee and Migrant Detention from Massachusetts to Bengal,” I contend that Quijano and his many interlocutors contribute to a deeper understanding of not only the US empire-state’s (Jung 2015) vast detention and deportation system, which includes the courts, but also the development of migrant and refugee detention across the Global North and South. By interpreting specific moments in Massachusetts and Bengal from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries that led to the detention of large refugee or migrant populations, I advance two arguments. First, detention became a thinkable and desirable policy solution to migration and the seeking of refuge globally because empires, and later (officially) decolonized states and international organizations, needed to govern colonized and racialized subjects on the move. Second, refugee and migrant detention, racialization, and dispossession are intimately and recursively linked.
Using documents collected during three years from archives in four countries—the United States, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Bangladesh —I argue that refugees, migrants, and asylum-seekers represent Frantz Fanon’s (1991) les damnés. In other words, they are populations that empires and their collaborators have marked as disposable, targeted for killing, raping, dispossession and expropriation (of family, home, property, and labor), and expulsion. I have found that Quijano’s explication of the coloniality of power articulates especially powerfully with the work of Indigenous, Black, and Caribbean scholars. Sylvia Wynter (2003), for example, repairs his omissions related to the central place of anti-Blackness in Iberian empires and their afterlives. Rosa O’Connor Acevedo (2023) has recently argued that, read together, Cedric J. Robinson (2000) and Sylvia Wynter (1989, 1995, 2003) provide a historically rich and theoretically cogent account of the relation between coloniality, anti-Blackness, and capitalist exploitation. Lisa Brooks’s (2019) and Christine M. DeLucia’s (2019) towering works on the events and enduring consequences of King Philip’s War in New England and Nelson Maldonado-Torres’s (2007) meditations on coloniality as constant war on les damnés are insightful glosses on Quijano’s understanding of Amerindian peoples’ experience with coloniality and their survivance in Latin America. The coloniality of power perspective’s open-ended nature, one that Catherine E. Walsh et al. (2024) likens to “a living and constantly moving organism” (p. 21), is thus an enormous strength as it lends itself to wide-spread application and acts as an invitation to scholars to be careful and precise in extending the perspective to their positionalities, concerns, and cases.
Quijano’s elaboration of the coloniality of power is important for another reason for graduate students like me. As it is an epistemic structure first and foremost, coloniality infuses all aspects of academia. Unlike the common refrain, which goes that in graduate school, one is transformed from a consumer of research to a producer of research, graduate school in the US empire-state in fact disciplines many students away from critical engagement 4 in society and transforms them instead into experts who produce knowledge on a society from which they are distanced. This process is doubly painful for students from the Global South who are expected to be native informants, a source of “authentic” information about their homes and research sites. Simultaneously, they can never be quite distanced enough and thus told that their research is parochial.
Quijano’s legacy as a scholar-activist who theorized from his position in the Global South and his impassioned call for decoloniality empower those of us also from the South and not quite disciplined into complete epistemic obedience (Mignolo 2011) by our professional training. His example and perspective provide us with the tools to call into question how coloniality structures what we study, read, and cite and how we interpret what we study, read, and experience. In one of Quijano’s last essays written in 2015 as a speech for an event, he stated that decoloniality was not “an idle question” and “the answer to it [wasn’t] just academic, [it was] political and vital” (Quijano 2024:415). He then contended that Latin American sociologists understood very well that illustrating the coloniality of power was a necessary part of a decolonial politics of knowledge production. Quijano is not taught very much or at all in sociology graduate programs in the United States, despite his training as a sociologist. I hope that the translation of so much of Quijano’s work and the incisive introduction provided by the editors Mignolo, Segato, and Walsh in Aníbal Quijano: Foundational Essays on the Coloniality of Power will induce his inclusion in graduate sociology curricula. But more importantly, I hope that this volume will remind graduate students that decoloniality, in the ways elaborated and exemplified by Quijano, is a project worth dreaming about and defending.
