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ABSTRACT
Restrictions on assembly, all of which disproportionately target Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, demonstrate that the freedom to assemble depends on state-defined temporal, behavioral, and spatial boundaries of political practice. This essay analyzes how the migrant caravans organized by Pueblo Sin Fronteras (PSF) push against the state-derived boundaries on assembly. Specifically, it focuses on two tactics deployed by the caravans: (1) using the term caravan and caravana to describe border crossing, and (2) media practices that turned undocumented border crossing into border refusal. These tactics contested the nation-state sovereignty required to mark its jurisdiction, and thus, to decide on the correct place and form of politics. In the end, the essay argues that the caravan expanded what it means to freely assemble by turning undocumented migration into protest. Communication scholars should pay attention to this expansion because it illuminates alternate ways of being political that push against the legacy of nation-state sovereignty and colonization.
Notes
1. Endres and Senda-Cook, “Location Matters,” 258.
2. Notable exceptions come from this journal. See: Primack and Johnson, “Student Cyberbullying inside the Digital Schoolhouse Gate,” and Sarapin and Morris, “Entertaining Free Expression on Public Sidewalks.” Tiara Na’puti’s “Archipelagic Rhetoric” also brilliantly problematizes the way that a landcentric notion of place that assumes a colonial geography often goes unquestioned in communication studies.
3. Abu El-Haj, “Defining Peaceably,”; Hansford, “The First Amendment Freedom of Assembly as a Racial Project.” Inazu, “The First Amendment’s Public Forum,” makes a similar claim, but he argues that TPM restrictions affect people in general, regardless of politics and race. Though I rely on Inazu’s in-depth coverage of public forum doctrine, I diverge from him on that point. I’m getting my definition of racism capitalism from Jodi Melamed in “Racial Capitalism” and from Cheryl Harris’ theorization of whiteness as a kind of status that provides the basis for allocating resources and privileges in “Whiteness as Property.”.
4. Abu El-Haj, 961. Hansford, 695–6.
5. Inazu, 1169.
6. Hague v CIO, 307U.S. 496 (1939), at 515.
7. For this reason, Hansford calls freedom of assembly clause a “racial project” that redistributes the freedom of assembly to whites and away from Blacks,” as well as Native Americans, Muslims, and other minorities, (709).
8. In Settler Sovereignty Lisa Ford claims that the unity of sovereignty, jurisdiction, and territory has been crucial to settler colonial empire-building in both the U.S. and Australia, but that aligning these elements within common law systems was an aspirational task that was internally contradictory as well as outright thwarted by Indigenous nations on both continents. See also Lauren Benton’s description of imperial expansion as a “search” for sovereignty because “empires did not cover space evenly…[they] were politically fragmented; legally differentiated; and encased in irregular porous, and sometimes undefined borders” (p. 2) in Search for Sovereignty.
9. Goeman, Mark My Words.
10. See Cisneros, The Border Crossed Us, and Flores, “Constructing Rhetorical Borders” for in-depth theoretical and historical accounts of the rhetoricity of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.
11. In addition to the initial colonization of the Americas, the border practices of the O’Odham nations on the U.S.-Mexico border and the Haudenosaunee on the U.S.-Canadian border show how this is an ongoing problem that has not been settled. See, for example, Gentry, et al., “Indigenous Survival and Settler Colonial Dispossession on the Mexican Frontier,” and Rickard, “Visualizing Sovereignty.”
12. See: Meeks, Border Citizens, and Gomez, Manifest Destinies.
13. See: Rosas, “The Managed Violences of the Borderlands;” Chávez, “Border Interventions.”
14. Two recent U.S. legal cases highlight the struggle over the government’s attempt to prohibit people from protesting in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. (1) After a 4-year fight, in 2018, the ACLU won Jacobson v. DHS, holding that people can access public roads near border enforcement zones for the purpose of protest. (2) The acquittal of Scott Warren in 2019, exonerating him for providing aid to undocumented migrants along the Arizona-Nogales border, also signals a progressive development in the official recognition of borderlands activism. See Warren, “In Defense of Wilderness” for an account of his legal struggles.
15. In the context of North America, the Indian Defense League and members of the nation’s comprising the Haudenosaunee Confederation routinely cross the U.S.-Canadian border (which imposes itself across their land and waterways) for pragmatic and political reasons. See Rickard, “Visualizing Sovereignty” and Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus.
16. It’s important to state my own positionality relative to Pueblo sin Fronteras since my identity as a white U.S. American structures my interpretation and representation of events. Indeed, in this essay, I speculate on the figure of the caravan and when white people write about communities they do not belong to, we wield a politics of language that can misrepresent concepts, identities, and even facts. To work against this tendency, I depend heavily on the reporting of local outlets like Radio Progreso and advocates like Iliana Martínez Hernández Mejía. Also, I thank my neighbors in central North Carolina, many of whom were undocumented Mexican and Central American, who taught me Spanish and taught me about the politics of transnational migration during the tumultuous period of the Bush administration.
17. Space does not allow for an in-depth examination of the problems contributing to the surge in emigration from Central America. For a helpful overview of U.S. presence in the region see: Colby, The Business of Empire.
18. See an overview at their website: https://www.pueblosinfronteras.org/viacrucis.html
19. As will be demonstrated below, the caravans enact a decolonization that is incommensurate with nation-state (settler) sovereignty. See Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization is not a Metaphor.”
20. Stevenson, “Migrant Caravan Swells to 5,000.”
21. See Inda, “Foreign Bodies,” and Cisneros, “Contaminated Communities.”
22. Senator Cowan, Cong. Globe, 2829. May 30, 1886
23. Chávez argues against seeing the caravan as an isolated spectacle; “The amount of place privilege it takes to glorify the collective migration across dangerous terrain and into dark unknown worlds is immense, but in the Western world, the notion of a caravan has often carried a connotation that turns attention from the peril that prompts the need for a caravan like the one traveling from Honduras and on through Mexico.” Instead, she theorizes the caravans as “coalitions in motion,” “calls to ethical relation,” and “weapons of the weak” (9–16). See Chávez, “Understanding Migrant Caravans from the Place of Place Privilege.”
24. Redacción Web, “Dialogo piden a gobierno en otra jornada antipeaje en Siguatepeque.”
25. Mejía, “Reflexiones sobre la caravana migrante,” 235.
26. Ibid.
27. Translated and summarized by author from videos posted by Radio Progreso and shared with permission. The original words are: “que no manejemos falsamente el concepto de que están buscando el sueño americano. Eso ay que descartarlo. Andan huyendo de la pesadilla en que nos tienen este régimen.” Access video at: https://www.facebook.com/RadioProgresoPaginaOficial/videos/299086094030974/
28. Original words: “Vamos todos a unirnos a nuestros hermanos…Hagamos nuestro el sudor de ese pueblo…hagamos nuestras las yagas que se están padeciendo sus pies…hagamos nuestras las angustias, pero también a las lágrimas”.
29. Keating, “From Borderlands and New Mestizas to Nepantlas and Nepantleras,” 6.
30. See Mejia’s reporting on their passage through Guadalajara in “El paso de las caravanas de migrantes por México.”
31. See video here: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=2079257788767578
32. See Fabreguet, et al. “They Are Our Brothers”
33. Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus, 11.
34. Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus; Rosas, Barrio Libre. For an overview of the rhetorical dimensions of refusal see Franz, “Usurping the Contract.”
35. Videos shared with permission from Radio Progreso’s Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/RadioProgresoPaginaOficial/