Beauty in the struggle: Insurgent safety and abolitionist commoning in Arizona

ABSTRACT

Arizona is one of the most punitive places on the planet, with an incarceration rate of 868 per 100,000 people. State actors use criminalization, policing, prisons, and probation to respond to social and economic problems at an industrial scale. In Arizona and across the country, public safety is understood through the logics and material practices of carcerality. Over the past decade, a series of rebellions against police violence and mass incarceration have destabilized the United States’ punishment regime. This article an effort to examine counter-hegemonic conceptualizations of safety at scale, asking: What do non-carceral forms of safety look like in Southern Arizona, in one ward, in one city? To answer this question, we examine the results of the Barrio Centro Community Safety Project (BCCSP) and the emergent practices of one neighborhood collective, Flowers & Bullets. We employ the term ‘abolitionist commoning’ to describe the centrality of land and place-making to recovering and building relations free from domination. In doing so, we advocate alongside a flock of scholars, organizers, and cultural workers for abolitionist models of safety that are place-based and emphasize experimentation, healing, self-determination, and (re)new(ed) modes of sociality.

KEYWORDS:

• Safety
• abolition
• the commons
• punishment
• Arizona
• settler colonial carcerality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Many of the members of the Flowers & Bullets collective identify as indigenous and some are a part of Calpulli Teoxicalli. For people in Arizona, and across the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, understandings of indigeneity are contested. There are Indigenous tribes in the United States that have been detribalized and who are not federally recognized. There are also many Mexican people who identify as Indigenous regardless of the status being sanctioned by the United States government (see Gómez, 2018; Cintli Rodríguez, 2014; Leza, 2018).

2. Criminalization in this context, attempts to accomplish two feats for the state: (1) to turn entire groups of people into objects of state and extra-judicial violence rather than subjects of state protection. Ethnic studies scholar Lisa Cacho (2012) names this condition ‘racialized rightlessness,’ wherein people ‘do not have the option to be law abiding, which is always the absolute prerequisite for political rights, legal recognition, and resource distribution in the United States’ (p. 8). Much like Lombroso’s born criminal, the structure of racialized rightlessness that Cacho identifies relies upon a priori reasoning that can never really be disproven; and (2) to ‘strenuously depoliticize ongoing material violence’ by transmuting a relation of domination – between the colonizer and the colonized – into a relation between the state and ‘the criminal’ (Nichols, 2014, p. 449).