Author: madderka

A “Closed College Campus” in Pinal County

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On Thursday, we visited Florence, Arizona, where half the population are inmates.   Before we left, I heard one of our teachers asking the other if she knew where we needed to go when we got to Florence.  I thought to myself, What does he mean, where are we going? We’re going to the prison, aren’t we?  I learned when we arrived in Florence that Riley’s question was extremely well-founded: there are (at least) four different detention centers in Florence, which is located in – this seems too tragically poetic to be true, but it is – Pinal County.

We received a tour of a facility  run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).  It is a detention center for people who have violated immigration law and are waiting for their cases to be processed by the courts.  It is one of 6 immigrant detention facilities run by ICE around the country – the rest are run by private prison companies like the Corrections Corporation of America.  There are 300 facilities in total, holding 35,000 people in detention at any given time.  Because the people in these facilities are not detained as punishment for being convicted of crimes, they live in dormitories, and they are not compelled to work. Most have no criminal history, and none are considered “dangerous criminals.”  The facility was described to us as “more like a closed college campus” than what we might have seen in movies or TV.  It’s true that it wasn’t like what I’d seen in Law and Order or Locked Up Abroad or on the tour of Alcatraz, but I wouldn’t describe it as my experience of college, either.  No one marches me to mealtime or regulates if I can have clothes under my bed, and I also have the freedom to leave when it pleases me.

And that detail, the freedom to leave, is key.  Yes, you might be thinking, duh, Maddie, of course they can’t leave – they’re detained. But precisely because they haven’t been convicted of anything, people in immigrant detention facilities don’t have sentences. They don’t know when they’ll be able to leave.  The head of the detention center said to us, “We’re America; I can’t keep someone locked up forever,” but what he didn’t say is that he can keep someone locked up indefinitely.  The reason why people are being detained in the ICE facility in Florence is because they are waiting on the outcome of their case, which will end in their being either released in the US or deported to their country of origin.  Some cases are decided quickly, within a matter of days, but others take years.  This uncertainty creates a huge amount of psychological stress, often more than that of people serving a sentenced amount of time in a less “college-like” prison.

It’s also important to note that the people being detained in Arizona were not necessarily apprehended in Arizona.  ICE is a federal operation.  Where people are detained has much more to do with bed space than geographical location.  Someone taken into custody in New Jersey is likely to wind up in Louisiana or somewhere else in the South; someone detained in Seattle might easily end up on one of ICE’s two daily flight loops in the western US, bound for Florence.  The geographical distance people have from their homes can also have an impact on the result of their case and their psychological wellbeing.  A separation of thousands of miles can make important documents harder to obtain, as well as testimony from individuals who can help establish residence or basis for asylum.

We met with two women from the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project  after our tour.  The Florence Project was started in the 80’s, when a federal judge felt extremely uncomfortable deporting people who had had to represent themselves in an unfamiliar and complicated legal system.   Because immigrant law is civil law, people in immigration court do not have the right to a state-appointed attorney.  Immigration law is also one of the most complicated and confusing types of US law, a close second to tax law.  Thus, many people in immigration court are don’t have the grasp of the legal system to represent themselves effectively.  The Florence Project provides people with legal information to help them better understand their rights and their cases.  This is critical for the people that they assist, but there are thousands more detained people than the Florence Project and other organizations like it can assist.  Usually, the only person paying attention to a detainee’s case is their deportation officer, whose goal is pretty clearly indicated by their name.

We left Florence, passing the Detention Center run by the Corrections Corporation of America and the Pinal County Adult Detention Center, and some other big, small-windowed buildings surrounded by fences and barbed wire.  I thought back to our guide’s firm stance that his job was apolitical – it was only his job to enforce the law.  He wasn’t about to determine which “alien” should or shouldn’t be in his detention center.  He said he liked to keep things in very strict order in his center and prevent hierarchies from forming amongst the detainees, because, he told us, “When you give someone power over someone else, they tend to abuse it.”

I almost audibly laughed when he said that, because the absurdity of his feeling entitled to make that sort of statement without acknowledging the complete power he has over the lives of every single person in his detention facility was too much.  Yeah, this detention center didn’t look like anything I’d seen on TV, but it still had locks, it still had guards, it still had blue and orange jumpsuits.  Is that not an abuse of ICE’s power over people who come here without documents?  Why should these people, most of whom have no criminal history, be locked in the desert behind layers of barbed wire, marching from meal to dorm to field, waiting to see if they’ll be released or put on a plane?  So their deportation officers can make sure they get to their deportation hearings, and then, unless they’ve managed to establish their right to be here (and I don’t have the statistics on this, but I don’t imagine very many aren’t deported), on a plane home to their country of origin.  It’s another angle of the same racist and dehumanizing mechanism that Streamline feeds.

This is not an abstract discussion.

On By madderkaIn Cross-Post, LinksLeave a comment

This was posted tonight on Facebook by my friend Faren Tang.

“The latest round of hate speech in Jewett– the words “cunt” and “whore splashed in paint on the 7th floor common room– has me convinced that someone is just trying to get a reaction out of those of us who care about the safety and humanity of all. And they will. Every time. Because I will say, every time: “Not on my campus. Not in my home. Not in my community.” I refuse to allow these things to be said and done without comment.

This is not a game. This is not an abstract discussion. Saying the kinds of hateful, violent, oppressive things that these menaces to our community have been saying creates a hateful, violent culture in which hateful, violent acts occurs. People die from sex-based violence all the time. Women right here in Dutchess County are murdered by their intimate partners on a regular basis. People are raped, and beaten, and abused, and killed because they are seen as objects. Every “Cunt” every “Whore,” every “She was asking for it,” every rape joke made, every slur slung contributes to the culture where people believe that these things are true, and in that culture people rape and beat and abuse and kill. People are assaulted on this campus all the time. One in four women and one in seven men who attend this college will be sexually assaulted by the time they graduate. As I’m writing this editorial, I am sitting in my bedroom in between phone calls with a woman who is in the hospital and trying to find a placement in a domestic violence shelter tonight. This is not a game.This is everyone’s problem. Every act of hate speech, every act of oppression against one group contributes to every other kind of oppression. Sexism, rape culture, racism, cissexism, heterosexsim, classism, ableism, imperialism, colonialism, capitalism are all systems of violent domination, and every act that contributes to one of these systems contributes to all of them. I refuse to stand for any of them. 

By now, I imagine many of you are tired of hearing my voice and reading my words. I am, too. This is not what I want to be doing with my time. This is not what I want any of us to have to do with our time. But I also believe it has to be done. By not reacting, by not taking a stand and insisting that this kind of oppressive, violent hate speech not be tolerated, we tacitly endorse it. And if you are tired of hearing what I have to say about this, then please, say something yourself.

I do not speak for all of feminism. I do not speak for all of feminists on this campus. I do not speak for all of feminists who consider themselves a part of Feminist Alliance. But I am speaking out because care about this. I care about all of us. And if we are going to be a community where we can feel safe, this must stop. We must not tolerate it. Not in our home. Not on our campus. Not anywhere. Not ever.”

-Faren Tang, VC ’13
I’m sad to be away from my VC community during this time on our campus.  It was only a year ago that I ran a teach-in to respond to hateful sexist and homophobic graffiti in my dorm.  I’m grateful for and proud of Faren’s and the feminist presence at Vassar right now.  Here in Tucson, I bear witness to the impact of all sorts of oppression, through bills SB 1070 and HB 2281, which are enforcing racial profiling and eliminating ethnic studies, and politicians standing at a podium, saying teachers who teach love are teaching hate, and Operation Streamline, and Tucson law enforcement questioning women who are reporting domestic violence about their own immigration status.  We have to take a stand against systemic oppression, whether it’s at Vassar or in Arizona or a federal bill or a global policy.  Faren is right – every act of oppression contributes to every other kind of oppression.

Hey! That’s a resource in your toilet!

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It was my turn to post on the Border Studies group blog this week, about our visit to Tucson native and rainwater harvester, Brad Lancaster. This post originally appeared on the BSP Fall ’12 blog.

A watershed is “that area of land, a bounded hydrological system, within which all living things are inextricably linked by their common water course and where, as humans settled, simple logic demanded that they become part of a community.”
— John Wesley Powell

Did you ever consider that we pee into clean drinking water? No, really, it’s clean and you can drink it. That’s why your cat does – it’s probably fresher than the water you leave out for her. Not only is this a common practice, in the United States we are mandated by law to turn clean water into toxic waste however many times a day nature calls us to, without considering what sort of impact this has on our community or environment.

Brad Lancaster is a Tucson native who has spent the past 20 years turning his property into a rainwater harvesting system and teaching others to do the same. We walked over to his house from our classroom last week, and came to think a little differently about borders.

Tucson is in a water crisis. The water table here has dropped 300 feet in the past 100 years, and continues to fall at an average rate of 3 feet per year. 44% of the energy the city of Tucson uses goes to pumping and filtering water. According to Brad, if Tucson used its rainwater as a resource instead of shooting it out of town through sewers and drains, this city in the desert would no longer have a water crisis, and we’d be more connected to the land and each other.

On Brad’s property, he uses very little or no city water; from what I gathered, the only energy used in the consumption of water is the energy used by his washing machine, which functions as a community laundromat. He gave us a tour of his composting toilet, his natural clay water filter, and his sunken garden beds, which collect water, rather than shed water like raised beds do. He led us in a “sun dance” to teach us how he developed passive heating and cooling systems for his house without blocking his neighbors’ winter sun. He also showed us the systems he’s created on his street to reduce flooding, by directing rain into roadside gardens of native plants. Brad’s house is a living laboratory of how Tucson could reimagine the way in which it uses the water that floods its streets every time it rains. “Turn a problem into a solution,” Brad says.

Brad took us on a virtual tour of neighborhoods in Portland, OR and Seattle, WA which have changed the way they interact with rainwater by narrowing streets and planting native plants that use the rainwater that falls into the soil that has replaced pavement. It is worth noting, however, that in these neighborhoods in Portland and Washington, innovative flood-control implementation has coincided with gentrification. I don’t personally know very much about these areas, but the question of access to the resources that allow these rainwater harvesting systems to be implemented and maintained was definitely in my head throughout Brad’s presentation. Most of the techniques he showed us rely more on community organizing, observation, and creative thinking than spending power. Still, “green living” is a buzzword these days, and when a neighborhood becomes more environmentally conscious, property values come up, and it becomes more difficult for low-income people to continue living there.

But perhaps if Brad’s methods were to become the norm, access wouldn’t be a problem anymore. Radical shifts in how we think about water are hard to imagine as reality, but around the world, as water becomes scarcer, people are beginning to think differently. Grey water harvesting is now legal in Arizona, California, and New Mexico, and the composting toilet in Brad’s yard is actually part of a trial to see if that specific composting system can become legal in Arizona.

Radical shifts in the way we think about water also require reimagining the way we think about borders. The way water rights work, especially in the southwest, where water is both scarce and in high demand, is a complicated maze of laws and dams and regulation, because state and international lines cut straight through watersheds; sometimes they are rivers themselves. Reimagine: borders drawn along watersheds, as John Powell said. If we imagine our communities as all of the people living within our watersheds, political borders fall away. Suddenly, we’re not only connected to Tucson, but we’re also connected to the greater Arizona community, and beyond, into Mexico. Water doesn’t stop at the border wall. If our borders come to be about the resources within an area whose bounds are defined by nature, we can start to think about working together to use those resources in a way that makes sense: harvesting the rain, only making use of what an aquifer can recharge on its own, and not peeing into drinking water, but rather into a pile of sawdust that can become compost for fruit trees.

I really love this

On By madderkaIn LinksLeave a comment

“What I’m talking about is reinventing how we love each other and knowing that solidarity is love, collaboration is love. And really, isn’t that what queerness is about: loving? I am talking about growing and cultivating a deep love that starts with those closest to us and letting it permeate out. Starting with our own communities. Building strong foundations of love.”

-Mia Mingus, On Collaboration: Starting With Each Other, August 3, 2012

Looking for Feminism in Oaxaca

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As a woman in a program comprised of mostly women, studying a phenomenon that has a huge effect on women, I have found myself growing increasingly frustrated with the lack of attention paid to how the political economy of migration has affected the lives of women.  So in Oaxaca, I took every opportunity I could to ask questions about how women are affected by shifts in population and social dynamics due to migration.

I asked one of the few women we did meet about how she saw gender and sexuality issues intersecting with her activist work.  She said, because it was mostly women working to help other women, men weren’t involved, so it was hard to see if there were inequalities between genders.   I didn’t really know what to ask after that, because if women don’t see their work as something feminist or radical, and they just see it as the work they do, then what business do I have trying to name that with language I’ve learned in a classroom at Vassar?

I’m conflicted, because on the one hand, when I look at a situation where women help women, I can see how it fits into a broader framework of the US as a paternalistic colonial power.  But on the other hand, women who are just trying to keep their families alive probably don’t have time to think about how their lives fit into some theoretical framework that I’ve worked out sitting at my computer in my dorm. Imposing my feminism is not contributing to their self-empowerment; it’s just a different kind of colonialism.  So how do I leave that mentality in the dorm room?

I’m inclined to think it’s not as simple or straightforward as asking some women I just met about how they see gender intersecting with their lives.  My instincts tell me that in order to understand how women negotiate the gender dynamics in their lives, I need to just be with them, listening, asking questions, sharing what I know and learning what they know, so the inherent power dynamic of interviewer and interviewee dissolves.  I think feminism works better when it comes from a place of mutual sharing and trust.

I’d love to hear others’ thoughts on this.

Taking Responsibility to Know My Neighbors

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So I just got back from a two-week trip to Mexico.  We went to Oaxaca, which has the largest indigenous population of any Mexican state, and recognizes indigenous forms of self-governance.  Out-migration has a huge impact on Oaxaca, particularly as a result of US corn imports and industrial agriculture practices, which rendered subsistence farming obsolete.  Rural Oaxaqueños migrate to the cities of Oaxaca, Mexico City, and to cities all over the US, including Poughkeepsie.

Ten days of our trip was devoted to an academic seminar, in which we visited various projects around rural Oaxaca which are trying to develop alternatives to migration.  Seeing the different projects and talking with individuals who worked in the organizations was, in some ways, really special.  I met a woman who had lived in Poughkeepsie and came back to Oaxaca after spending seven years as a cleaner at IBM and other office buildings. She showed us the stream by their community, and we shared a joke about its being like the Hudson.  I think it was valuable to have the very real and emotional experience of meeting someone who I could’ve easily crossed paths with at some point in my life.  We were, in essence, neighbors.  If I meet Oaxacan immigrants in Poughkeepsie in the future, I’ll tell them I was there, and that will probably make our relationship stronger.

But it also felt kind of icky to be in Oaxaca.  I felt a disconnect between conversations we had in the States before we left on our trip about building solidarity, and the reality of what we could be as visitors in a place for a very short time.  In a few hours, all an organization can really do is give a brief outline of what they do.  I felt very aware of my ability to choose what I did and didn’t see.  Being in my position as a white woman in a group of Americans visiting these organizations which were compelled to answer to us felt complicit in the overarching mechanism of American colonialism.

And what this made me feel was a whole lot of guilt, and that’s a problem.  After some conversations in Oaxaca post-seminar, I feel like guilt is probably one of the most powerful weapons against solidarity and the kind of movement I think is necessary in order to break down systems of oppression.   As much as it is my responsibility to check my privilege and the ways in which I participate in the oppression of others, it is also not my fault that I have some privileged identities (my race, ethnicity, nationality, class background, ability status, cisgenderedness).  I have felt the way guilt affects how I participate in communities: when I’m thinking about privilege as a guilt thing, I start to judge myself and others, and both that entirely defeats the purpose of checking privilege and keeps me from forming meaningful relationships.  There is potential in this world to cultivate a really beautiful community of people who celebrate each other for the work that we do and stand in solidarity with each other.  I hope that when this semester ends, I leave Arizona with a broader network of people around the country that I will collaborate with throughout my life in different ways.  In order for that to happen, though, I need to do my best to shed this feeling of guilt, and instead celebrate myself and celebrate others, and do so out of love.

Check back later this week for my thoughts about being a feminist in Oaxaca and on this program.

SB 1070 In Effect

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SB 1070 section 2(b) began to be enforced last week.  This is the part that the Supreme Court didn’t strike down; the one that allows local law enforcement to ask for people to show them documentation of their authorization to be in the US if they have “reasonable suspicion” that they are in the country without documentation.

Watch Jeff Biggers discuss 1070 on Democracy Now! here:

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/9/24/as_anti_immigrant_papers_law_takes

NAFTA & Political Economy of Migration

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NAFTA & Political Economy of Migration is a helpful article by Collin Harris, broadly outlining how NAFTA, other neoliberal policies, and border militarization have shaped the conditions for migration from Mexico to the US:

“NAFTA finalized the restructuring of the Mexican economy that began in 1982. As Mexico was “locked in” to the neoliberal economic model, peasant farmers and assembly plant workers sought economic refuge in the country directly to the north, the center of the world’s economy. As “free” market policies pressured the state into cutting budgets for social services, Mexican communities were left with few options. Displacement of Mexican workers is the defining legacy of NAFTA-era Mexico while U.S. industries benefit from “illegal” migrants who demand much less than their U.S. counterparts in terms of wages, benefits, and legal protections. In 2001-2002, while the American economy was shedding millions of jobs, Mexican migrants arrived in staggering numbers. Currently, the vast majority of international migration in the global economy is forced migration.”

-Collin Harris

Sanitized Injustice

On By madderkaIn Original Commentaries1 Comment

Prison relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.

— Angela Davis

Operation Streamline embodies this quotation.  I saw it in action today in a courtroom in Tucson.  Operation Streamline resulted from the creation of a “zero-tolerance” immigration policy, in which people entering the US for the first time without documentation are charged in criminal court with a misdemeanor, and people entering for the second (or third or fourth) are charged with the felony of reentry after deportation.  The “Streamline” part of the Operation is that 70 people are tried and sentenced in the space of 2 hours, in the same courtroom, within days of being detained.  If that doesn’t sound constitutional to you, well, it doesn’t to me, either. Apparently the courts that have addressed the constitutional question have said effectively, “no harm, no foul, let Operation Streamline continue.”  The Supreme Court hasn’t said anything about it. Yet.

“Special proceedings” like Streamline happen in a large courtroom.  There is an eerie sterile nature to the courtroom.  Hand sanitizer pumps are all over the room, on every table.  The ceiling is brightly colored because someone thought that would be appropriate for a desert courtroom.  I sit in the back corner with the other Border Studiers. The people on trial that day sit in the gallery and in the jury box, the chains at their wrists and ankles clinking as they shift in their seats.  Between the vaulting ceilings and the muffled whisper of the Spanish/English interpreter speaking into her microphone, the judge’s words are lost. I can’t really hear him, though I do notice that he calls the defendants, “gentlemen and lady.” 

He calls groups of eight forwards. They are chained at the wrists and ankles, wearing the same clothes they were detained in, earphones for the Spanish interpretation dangling from their ears.

The process is fast: they say “sí, sí, no, no, culpable, no,” affirming their names, giving up their rights, admitting their guilt, and away they are led, through a door, but not before their attorneys pull the earphones out of their ears, because most can’t reach, thanks to the chains. Most are sentenced to time already served.  They will be deported.  Others are sentenced for any number of days: 30, 60, 100.  Afterwards, they’ll be deported.

At one point, the prosecutor speaks up.  “Your honor, this defendant has past charges; the state requests that he be sentenced to five days in a correctional facility.”  The judge grants the request. 

Why? Why bother? What does five days in a jail matter?  Or 100, for that matter?  What’s the mentality behind sentencing these people to prison or deportation for entering the country illegally?  These people aren’t coming to play a sneaky trick on the citizens of the United States. They’re walking through the desert for days to find jobs to feed their families, because it’s the only way to have some hope of survival, thanks to the US decimation of the Mexican economy. Incarceration doesn’t solve the problems of economic policies like NAFTA allowing the US to flood the Mexican market with subsidized corn, outcompeting Mexican farmers and leaving them with no means of income.

Operation Streamline meets no logical end to an actual problem.  Instead, what it does is feed the prisons – prisons owned by for-profit, public corporations, which depend on the US government paying them millions of dollars per month to hold inmates.  These corporations can build huge correctional facilities and then lobby for new legislation that fill their beds. The legislation is popular because it “fights crime” and builds the economy. The southwest economy is built on border militarization.  Prisons and law enforcement agencies and the US Marshall create jobs.  Jobs that rely on racist and dehumanizing operations like Streamline.