Deviant Immigrant Legacies: Tactics against Fear

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

Anti-immigration rhetoric, xenophobic violence, and policing against immigrants and their children in the United States have been escalating over the last decades with the first implementations of the “Prevention to Deterrence” policies in 1994. The killing of migrants via the harsh conditions of the desert, vigilante violence, detention facilities, and family separation counterposes the deployment of cheap migrant labor that remains captive and anonymous. The new Trump administration has promised mass deportations and while this might be an empty threat, ultimately hazardous to capitalist industries and therefore not implementable, it signifies another violent blow that is by no means new in the history of the American Empire. As Kelly Lytle Hernandez points out (Migra! A History of the US Border Patrol, 2010) the spectacularization of deportation aims to instill fear in all immigrants and fear, as we know, is a core practice of imperialism and colonialism. This panel theorizes deviant immigrant practices as refusals of fear, as political acts that can create everyday spaces of enjoyment, becoming in their own ways a sort of pedagogy of something more than survival. The panel thinks with scholars and activists like Mireya Loza (Defiant Braceros. How Migrant Workers Fought for Racial, Sexual, and Political Freedom, 2016) or trans woman and undocumented activist, Jennicet Gutiérrez, who confronted Barack Obama’s immigration policies publicly at the White House during Pride Month in 1995. The presenters of this panel think of deviance as a capacious signifier encompassing sexual preference, gender, Indigeneity, and Blackness, linked to old survivalist strategies dated to colonial times; they also contemplate deviancy as topography, bodily movement, humor, and style in everyday practices, that express, even when momentarily, the embodiment of fearlessness.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• “Guatemalan Colonial State, Forced Migration and Maya Resistance to Turtle Island” - Emil’ Keme, Emory University

• “Undocu-comics and Unwellness: Graphic Narratives on Immigration, Land, Debility, and Fearlessness” - Rocío Pichon-Rivière, UC Irvine

• "Deviant India: When Norman Mailer Stabbed Adele Morales" - Olga Rodriguez-Ulloa, Indiana University

Chair

• Judith Rodríguez, Indiana University-Bloomington

Biographical Information

Emil’ Keme is an Indigenous K’iche’ Maya scholar from Iximulew (Land of Corn, and the K’iche’ name for Guatemala), and professor of English and Indigenous studies at Emory University. He is a first-generation college graduate. His teaching and research focus on contemporary Indigenous literatures and social movements, Central American-American literatures and cultures, and postcolonial and subaltern studies theory. Keme is the author of Le Maya Q’atzij/Our Maya Word. Poetics of Resistance in Guatemala (2021; Spanish, 2020 and 2022), which won Cuba’s prestigious Casa de las Americas Literary Criticism Prize in 2020, and Maya Nationalisms and Postcolonial Challenges in Guatemala (2009; Spanish 2008). He has also published edited volumes and numerous articles on Indigenous rights. His current research, which has been supported by fellowships like Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, focuses on Indigenous struggles for self-determination in various parts of Abiayala (the Indigenous ancestral name of the Americas). His work aims to highlight the potentialities of building trans-hemispheric Indigenous alliances by critically exploring the field of Indigenous studies, settler colonial borders, Indigenous forced migration, Indigenous approaches to environmental justice, and Indigenous women and LGBTQ2s+ rights. Keme is a co-founding member of the binational Maya anti-colonial collective, Community of Maya Studies, Ix’balamquej Junajpu Wunaq’, and volunteers as a cultural advisor for the International Mayan League in Washington, D.C. He is also a trustee of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, where he serves in the Collections & Scholarship, and Repatriation Committees.

Rocío Pichon-Rivière research interests include trans and queer theory, comics, critical phenomenology, decolonial feminism, health humanities, graphic medicine, and their engagement in contemporary Latinx and Latin American literature and visual culture. She has published essays in GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, PMC: Postmodern Culture, Literature and Medicine, and Res Publica: Revista de Historia de las Ideas Políticas. My soon-to-be-published book manuscript “La piel de la política: Observaciones trans-feministas sobre la diferencia” [“The Flesh of Politics: Trans-Feminist Notes on Difference”] studies Latin American trans and cis women thinkers who wrote autobiographical essays as a medium to articulate a transformative political theory that seeks to dismantle notions of shame and punishment, and instead reimagine collective healing through the arts and radical embodiment. Her second book project, tentatively titled Picturing Power, studies Latinx graphic medicine, that is to say, comics that address topics of illness and harm, to visualize the roots of health disparities in past and present colonialism and to reimagine embodied liberation. Additionally, Pichon-Rivière conducting NIH-funded interdisciplinary research on graphic medicine with fabulous colleagues at UCR and UCI, exploring the impact of comics-making workshops on the wellbeing of care providers working with marginalized communities in Inland Southern California.

Olga Rodríguez-Ulloa has recently co-edited the anthology Punk! Las Américas Edition, Intellect Books, 2021. The volume takes a hemispheric view of punk as a manifestation of a heterogeneous and contentious Americas. Contributors examine punk scenes all the way from Alaska to the Mapunkies in Patagonia. Her current solo book project, Sadistic Cholas: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Peru (forthcoming Texas UP), explores the political resignification of the racial slur chola as it is now deployed by queer trans-feminist performers, authors, and collectives who advance a transfeminist critique via their aesthetic use of violence in sex and politics. Using a hemispheric critical framework that incorporates Black, Latinx, and Indigenous studies, the manuscript theorizes the long durée of the chola’s racialization and sexualization in the Andean context alongside current reappropriations of the term. Departing from representations of Peru’s 1980s war, the book explores potential connections between women’s participation as armed militants and the feminist present. In future research, Rodríguez-Ulloa plans to delve into US archival materials around South American immigrants and the largely dormant character of their stories within the dominant US imaginaries of Latinidad. She has published in the Journal of Latin American Culture Studies, Latin American Literary Review, e-flux, and emisférica amongst others.