Economies Otherwise: Migrant Critiques of Economic Value and its Promises

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

This roundtable seeks to create a dialogue among scholars interested in thinking about how the global poor are critiquing new forms of financial imperialism through cryptocurrency and reconceptualizing the value of labor and promise of migration. The roundtable will start with some examples of the kinds of questions we are grappling with and some examples and then pose questions to the audience.
The roundtable will build on the work of feminist approaches to the economy by Susana Narotzky to reflect on how crisis, value, and hope help us rethink economic life by rooting it in the everyday realities of ordinary people. Jorge Cuellar for example, will offer an introduction into the ways cryptocurrency is framed as a cure but inevitably creates greater precarity for Salvadorans and show examples of how Salvadoran’s organized against this change through #noalbitcoin protests. Alicia Schmidt Camacho returns our attention to economic dimensions of the 2019 migrant justice platform that articulated, “migrant workers subsidize the global economy; and immigration is not a domestic issue. We are here because you are there.” Schmidt Camacho seeks to think through how migrant workers define the different kinds of value attached to their laboring and build transnational solidarity through a range of economic projects. Damian Vergara Bracamontes will raise the question of what is the worth of migration? It is often assumed that migration necessarily results in upward mobility in relation to the country of origin, but Vergara Bracamontes questions if that is indeed the case if we consider for example, the high costs of living undocumented in the US? This is a call to trouble the myth of migration and promise of legal status by examining the material realities of migrant life.
Sample Questions for the panelists will include:

-How do feminist approaches to the economy offer different conceptions of value (not value in the sense of labor worth, but as in what people work for when they work for themselves)?
-What examples can we pull from other contexts, such as the Puerto Rican case, to understand the potential havoc that cryptocurrency will have as a form of imperial rule on Salvadorans?
-What is the promise of migration? And how do we measure its worth?

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Panelists

• Alicia Schmidt Camacho, Yale University

• Jorge Cuéllar, Dartmouth College

• Damian Vergara, UIUC

Biographical Information

Jorge Cuéllar, Assistant Professor of Latin American, Latino & Caribbean Studies (jorge.cuellar@dartmouth.edu)
Cuéllar is a scholar of politics, culture, and daily life in modern Central America. His current book project, Everyday Life and Everday Death in El Salvador, traces practices of peoplehood, community formation, and life making amongst the varied groups in el Salvador since the end of the Salvadoran Civil War. A public scholar, Cuéllar has written numerous public pieces on the expansion of carceral regimes in El Salvador, pandemics impact on Central American migration, and financial experiments in Latin America. He is also advises the Central America Project a student driven public humanities intiative to bring attention to Central American scholarship, analysis, and culture in the US and the Isthmus.

Alicia Schmidt Camacho, Professor Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, Yale University (alicia.camacho@yale.edu)
Schmidt Camacho is the author of Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (NYU 2008) which explores the transnational movement of Mexican migrants and their expressive cultural and social movement practices. She has published numerous journal articles and public pieces defending migrant rights and exposing gender violence. One recent example is her piece in the New Yorker which examined the role of anti-black racism in US border policing which targeted Haitian Asylum seekers. She is currently at work on two book projects. The Carceral Border studies the state and social violence along the migrant corridor through North America while Migrant Justice considers the significance of defending human mobility in an era of mass deportation. Schmidt Camacho is a long time activists and defender of migrant rights as an active partner with multiple migrant rights organizations including the Global Labor Justice Project, National Day Laborer Organizing Network, Junta for Progressive Action and the Connecticut Bail Fund.
Damian Vergara Bracamontes is an Assistant Professor in the Gender and Women’s
Studies Department at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Vergara Bracamontes
is a scholar of Latinx migration studies, critical prison studies, and queer and trans of color
critique. He is currently working on two book projects, one on LGBTQ immigrant detention
and his current manuscript, The Administration of Illegality and Mexican Migrant Life, which
traces the formation and consolidation of illegality in a new phase of prolonged social
exclusion and control. His work has appeared in Ethnic Studies Review, Routed Magazine,
and The Abusable Past.