OCCUPIED TERRITORIES

Abstract

The first occupational health survey of non-migrant Salvadoran workers in the United States, conducted by the Tenants’ and Workers’ Support Committee of Northern Virginia in Alexandria, Virginia in 1997–98, revealed the surprising normalcy of ‘native populations’, identified not by place of birth but by status and position, by the politics of bodies within the body politic. This surprise at normalcy occurs at the intersection of US postcoloniality, US imperialism and US empire; it emerges as a signature of the intersectionality of US public health policy understood as racialized sexualized violence. The immigrant natives’ surprising normalcy articulates with time in such a way as to make the question of map and location a crisis.

Keywords:

• Salvadoran
• immigrant
• public health
• time
• normalcy

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the members of the Tenants’ and Workers’ Support Committee. Jon Liss, Silvia Portillo, David Staples, of TWSC, and Glenn Pranksy contributed to earlier versions. Earlier versions were presented at the Human Sciences Program Colloquium at the George Washington University, Washington, DC; ‘The Study of History and Culture in the Beginning of the 21st Century’, University of Thessaly, Volos, Greece; The New Social Forms Seminar at University of Stellenbosch, Stellenbosch, South Africa. Thanks to Rachel Riedner, Ioanna Laliotou, Steve Robins and Sung-ae Choi for their interventions. Thanks to the DC Marxist Feminist Study Group for its vigilant collective labour. Thanks to Sammie Moshenberg for close readings and to Simon Fonseca for his, far away so close.

Notes

¹In the early 1970s, John Langston Gwaltney set out to conduct an anthropological field-study self-portrait of the ‘ordinary, acceptable, drylongso standards of core black culture’ (1993: xxiii) in the United States, to attempt to portray without betrayal the heroically ordinary Black nation that attempted to live with a sense of dignity ‘in spite of the weight of empire that rests upon their backs’ (1993: xxiii). Gwaltney's strong words indicted misbegotten policies and practices of State, civil society, the everyday, the public sphere, the polity and their disciplinary and interpretive apparatuses and formation in the United States. Gwaltney offers survival as one possible way of reading United States populations’ core cultures, its ‘native’ cultures, postcolonially. Postcolonial anthropology, Gwaltney suggests, cannot be physical anthropology, it must be cultural materialist anthropology.

²For Negri, the struggle over the working day demonstrates the communist desire for time, which is then superseded and subsumed by the love of time: ‘the acceleration of time represents a fundamental character of constituent power. Now, this acceleration must not be so much understood as such (in the metaphysical scenario, if we look at the creativity of the multitudo, this acceleration is founded on an ontological accumulation already realized) but, rather, interpreted as love of time – of time, its very singular emergencies, and the apparition of the event. The love of time is the substance of the disutopia that fills constituent power. The love of time is the indicator of the singular content of strength. The acceleration of historical time reveals the continual creativity of the ontological figure of constituent power as paradigm of the political, that is, as the matrix of an expansion of interrelations among singularities, always renewed and always open to another renewal. The love of time is nothing but the ontological expansion of the relation between constituent power and revolution. … The political is the horizon of the revolution, not terminated but continued, always reopened by the love of time. Every human drive in search of the political consists in this: in living an ethics of transformation through a yearning for participation that is revealed as love for the time to constitute’ (Negri 1999: 334–5).