Transcript - "Citizenship, Illegalization, and Insularity"
March 10, 2022 -- Radical Kinship Series
Listen to "Citizenship, Illegalization, and Insularity" with Joel Sati and Dan-el Padilla Peralta.
Leti Volpp: Good afternoon, and welcome to our event, Citizenship, Illegalization, and Insularity. Before we begin, let me say that there's live captioning available, which you can find in the button in the bottom right-hand corner of your screen, which says CC Live Transcript. I want to begin with the land acknowledgment.
We take a moment to recognize that Berkeley sits on the territory of Huchiun, the ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenyo-speaking Ohlone people, the successors of the historic and sovereign Verona Band of Alameda County. This land was and continues to be of great importance to the Muwekma Ohlone tribe and other familial descendants of the Verona Band. We recognize that every member of the Berkeley community has and continues to benefit from the use and occupation of this land since the institution's founding in 1868. Consistent with our values of community and diversity, we have a responsibility to acknowledge and make visible the university's relationship to native peoples. By offering this land acknowledgment, we affirm Indigenous sovereignty and will work to hold the University of California, Berkeley, more accountable to the needs of American Indian and Indigenous peoples. My name is Leti Volpp, and I'm the Director of the Center for Race and Gender here at UC Berkeley. We're thrilled that you can be with us for today's event, which is the second event this spring in our radical kinship series, Scholars and Artists on Undocumented and Unauthorized Migration. Let me thank our co-sponsors for today's event. The On the Same Page program, the Multicultural Community Center, the Undocumented Student program, and the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative, we thank you so much for your support of this work. I now want to introduce the fabulous organizer of the Radical Kinship series and the moderator of today's event, Alan Pelaez Lopez. Alan is an Afro-Zapotec artist and scholar from Oaxaca, Mexico. They are the author of Intergalactic Travels, Poems from a Fugitive Alien, published by The Operating System in 2020, which was a finalist for the 2020 International Latino Book Award, as well as the author of To Love and Mourn in the Age of Displacement, published by Nomadic Press also in 2020. This fall, Alan will begin a new tenure track position at San Francisco State. So thank you so much. And I will now turn it over to Alan.
Alan Pelaez Lopez: Thank you so much, Leti, for that introduction. Welcome, everybody to the digital space. My name is Alan. And I'll be moderating today's event. This will conclude the series for the academic year. If you are interested in hearing the other talks, you can always search for them on the Center for Race and Gender website, which they are archived there. And I'm so excited to be introducing both of our panelists for today Joel Sati and Professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta. I'll be reading their bios, and then we will head into the presentations. After both presentations are over, there will be a Q&A portion. So feel free to use the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen. Throughout the presentations and later on, we will look through the questions.
So our first panelist will be Joel Sati. Joel Sati is a PhD candidate in jurisprudence and social policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and a JD candidate at Yale Law School. His work combines theoretical work on immigration with a philosophy of criminal law. His dissertation focuses on the increased use of criminal enforcement tactics in immigration enforcement, the immigration consequences of criminal enforcement, and the expanding criminalization of immigration violations. Sati graduated from the City College of New York in 2016 with a BA in philosophy and a 2018 recipient of the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans. One of Sati's latest publication is Other Borders, The Illegal as Normative Metaphor published in the edited volume We Are Not Dreamers, Undocumented Scholars Theorize Undocumented Life in the United States published in 2020 by Duke University Press.
And our second panelist for today is Professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta, Dominican by birth and New Yorker by upbringing. Dan-el Padilla Peralta is an associate professor of classics at Princeton who researches and teaches the Roman Republic and early empire as well as classical reception in contemporary, American, and Latin American cultures. Professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta's memoir Undocumented, A Dominican Boy's Odyssey from the Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League was published in 2016 by Penguin Books. I still remember the day the memoir was announced in 2015. The few migrant activists who dabble in the literary world sent me text messages and emails to put it on my radar. And the novel later became one of the heartbeats of a chapter in my dissertation at UC Berkeley. Professor Padilla Peralta is also the co-editor of Rome, Empire of Plunder, the Dynamics of Cultural Appropriation published in 2018 by Cambridge University Press alongside Matthew Loar and Carolyn MacDonald. His latest academic book Divine Institutions, Religions, and Communion in the Middle Roman Republic was published in 2020 by Princeton University Press. Thank you so much, both of you, for accepting this invitation. So we are going to begin with Joel Sati and then with Dan-el Padilla Peralta and conclude with a Q&A. So, Joel, I'll offer the digital space to right now.
Joel Sati: Yeah. Thank you so much, Alan, for moderating this event. And I'm really honored to be in this space and sharing it also with one of my heroes, Dan-el Padilla Peralta. I remember, in, like, late 2015, 2016, a professor of mine made me aware of his memoir. And I remember reading it. And I think at some point, in the spring, he was giving a presentation at Columbia University. And I remember just, like, running up there after a class. And so I had a chance to meet him. And he signed my book. And then a few months later, we ended up meeting again at Columbia. And it was like, it was great. And so I was just like, I have these ambitions of being an academic and sort of like going into this path. I mean, there is the kind of just amazing feeling of seeing yourself in someone who's a little bit further along and just doing what you're doing. And so it's very strange to share this space with him in this way. I think, past me would have been absolutely mind blown. But it was great.
So the presentation today or at least my talk is going to be on illegalization. And I think the subtitle is why we need to understand this concept. Now, I'm sure people with their own little corner of research will say, like, their corner of the research is like the most important thing. And for me, maybe I'll just say, understanding legalization is the most important thing. But I do really genuinely think that understanding illegality at this particular point in time is going to be critical in how we think about borders and how we think about the immigrant rights movement and how we think about a lot of issues. And 2022 is 10 years after DACA was announced and put into effect. And maybe it was because I was naive at the time. I had just started being an immigrant rights activist. But I remember thinking that this was actually going-- it's a stop gap. There's a lot of talk about comprehensive immigration reform. And this is going to be something that is going to augur something that the immigrant rights movement has been wanting for a while. And as the years pass-- and now we stand here 10 years later, there has been no comprehensive immigration reform. DACA itself barely survived the Supreme Court challenge which happened my first year of law school, which was great, not really. And so DACA and expanded DACA was enjoined. And also in that time, millions of people have been deported under both Democratic and Republican administrations. And so in thinking about where we are, I thought that things-- I initially thought that things seemed hopeless. And as I thought about that, I thought back to how I was when I had just graduated high school, I'd found out that I'm undocumented. I couldn't go to college. And this was before DACA and I couldn't work. And I remember thinking at the time that, OK, at this point, I could be anything that I wanted to be. If it doesn't work out, nobody knows. But if it does work out, it's going to make a hell of a story.
And I feel like we're in a similar situation where there doesn't seem to be a path to a kind of legislative intervention in terms of comprehensive immigration reform. But I wanted to-- I want to take that opportunity to say that maybe this is an opportunity for us to really think about what justice and migration looks like and for our thinking on the topic to be as borderless as the world we want to create. And I remember-- and I think understanding the legalization and crimmigration-- though I hate the term-- is incredibly important. And I'm going to start in September of 2012. I was just about to apply for my first instance of DACA. And I remember also seeing other people there with me and thinking we have all of these documents. We're trying to meet all of these evidentiary requirements. We're giving USAS all of our information. We have documents, but what is it about these documents, right? Why are we undocumented? And it was one of those instances-- and I remember thinking, well, it's not a matter of having or lacking documents, it's a matter of the state recognizing or not recognizing certain aspects of people's existence and insofar as that is reflected in documents, we talk of undocumented. And also, undocumented has been presented as a kind of tamer counterbalance to illegal or illegal alien. And there's something about illegal and illegal alien that it's too accurate in the sense that the law does treat people as illegal when it detains and deports people or when it makes it so hard to become-- it makes it so hard to regularize or it makes it so hard to come with status or to retain a status that people will lapse into illegality. And so the law creates this lack of status. And there's-- and as accurate as the term is, there is this kind of dynamic aspect of it that I remember thinking a concept should really be able to account for.
And so I came across literature on illegalization. So this has been since I would say, the mid-2000s with Nicholas Digenova and other scholars. And I remember thinking, OK, well this is something that's in the academy. But it also seems like it's something that is particularly applicable to the movement. Now at the time, I was moving from someone who was an activist and an organizer to someone who's now an academic. And I wanted to make sure that the work that I was producing, one, was always true to the people that needed it the most. And I think one of the challenges of the academy, I've noticed, is that sometimes you're asked to put these parts of you on the back burner in order to, like, pay dues in a way that will, like, erase the reason you came to the academy. And I do think the academy has a lot of potential to aid the movement. And so in being able to work on projects like We're Not Dreamers, hopefully, that's one of those ways. And so in terms of-- and so illegalization was particularly attractive to me for this reason. And I found that it was able to account for not only just the dynamic ways in which immigration law was changing or at least illegality was being cast and recast or was being fought, like, fought about through the courts or in the legislature and whatnot, but also it really was able to capture a lot of the limits that discussion was-- that current or at least that existing discourse on immigration had.
So I remember writing a piece back when I was an undergrad about dreamer endorsements and how I thought each Democratic political candidate having a dreamer who can sort of like be the mascot for their policies was itself a kind of meta endorsement because it was the candidate who was trying to say, this is the kind of immigrant that's worthy of-- that's worthy to have some kind of political cloud. And in that kind of arrangement, it would make it-- it would reify these kinds of damaging dreamer narratives but also would provide cover for an increasing level of immigration enforcement. And so-- and after-- And so I think, at that-- I think, at that point, it was just a way or it was-- sorry, I think at that point it was coalescing all these different trains of thoughts. And also, another thing that's really important in understanding illegalization is that it also can really bring in and fold in anti-Black histories or anti-Black dimensions of how law occurs in practice. I remember thinking that it was weird that I was the only Black person in a lot of my immigrant rights spaces. And also, I remember, in August of 2014, I remember like it was yesterday, the death of Mike Brown and how that really brought something, that little light bulb where I was like, well, look, we've been fighting for papers all of this time, right? And what does it mean to fight for papers if, for some people, they can get them and still be subject to this kind of violence from the state. And I think that was something that catalyzed a lot of really important and necessary discussions within the immigrant rights movement that led to things like the undocublack movement that really made apparent that immigration was a Black issue and that anti-racism is an important part of immigration justice.
And so-- and so as I-- and so like these thoughts had been percolating, and I remember thinking, OK, as a grad student, like, I had-- I had been working on these ideas and I thought, there needs to be a little bit more. And so I did what any reasonable person would do and apply to law school. And during law school, like I said, my first semester of law school was the DACA litigation. So I remember that being just an absolute-- I was absolutely just baptized in fire, like, in law school because every one of my assignments was about this litigation. But I also just remember, like, really thinking about this link between the criminal law and immigration and how it wasn't incidental that illegal was a term that was common to both of these domains. And as I was able to continue my studies here in law school and be familiar with the work of people like Jennifer Jacome or Cesar Garcia Hernandez and thinking about ways in which-- and understand I think this is probably going to be the greatest irony of the legalization, which is in order to enforce borders, the immigration enforcement apparatus itself has to be borderless. So it has to-- so this kind of collaboration between police and ICE or you have agencies that weren't built to deal with immigration itself now dealing with them under the guise of national security. There is the constant criminalization of immigrants. And another dimension-- and so as these dynamics change, the illegality still remains, it still stays the same. And also even with the Biden administration and the interdiction of Haitian refugees via Title 42 and I think now it's been renewed for another period.
And I'll just end with this, in terms of how illegalization can help us think about immigration justice, I've always, like, really really held on to this idea of migration as a human right. And I think as I've looked into rights language, the more skeptical I am of rights language, because as I understand or at least as I understand it the right to migrate has always been juxtaposed or it has always been put in conversation with the states' rights to control its borders. And the thing about movement, I think, is that, like, movement is a basic part of human existence. It is an important part of human flourishing. And when we-- and thinking about the right to migrate, I think, really somehow reifies and solidifies borders and the violence that constitutes them. And I know that, in the moment, it's important to communicate the moral importance of affirming migration and not to-- and for the state to not effect violence based on one's migration status among other markers of social identity. But I do think a just world is possible. And in that world, when we think of migration, I hope that we think of it as such a fundamental part of human existence that we think about the right to migration as absurd as the right to breathe. And so even though now, 10 years after DACA, there hasn't been the kinds of interventions that the immigrant rights movement or any ally has hoped for, I would want this to be an opportunity to really push the boundaries as to what-- as to the potential of the immigrants rights movement can do because, quite frankly, there really isn't nothing to lose at this point. So thank you.
Alan Pelaez Lopez: Thank you so much, Joel, for that presentation on illegalization and why it's important in our contemporary migrant justice movement and also in the academy. Now I'm going to pass the digital space to Professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta. And then we'll do the Q&A. So I'll pass over the digital space to you.
Dan-el Padilla Peralta: Thank you so much again for the warmth of the welcome. And to the Center for Race and Gender for making tonight's event possible. Alan, thank you so much for convening us and for giving us this digital space in which, to think, I am joined by a toddler whom you may see poking her head into the screen, and audibly, the screams of another toddler who is taking to sleep very poorly tonight.
What I will do following in Joel's footsteps is to reflect on fugitivity as a practice associated with and potentially capable of expanding the remit and capabilities of citizenship. And I undertake this work from several perspectives. I undertake it, in the first instance, as a formerly undocumented immigrant for whom the business of documentation and illegalization, as Joel brought out in his presentation, are absolutely crucial to my own ways of being in the world. I also come to this work as a historian of ancient societies and as a historian of the ancient Mediterranean in particular. And I also come to this work as someone with a deep and abiding interest in diasporic study and the diasporas of the Caribbean. And so without any further ado, I'm going to share a few slides to initiate the conversation. So every few years, I teach a course on citizenship at Princeton. And for the last iteration, which was offered in the fall of 2020, we concluded our run of pre-recorded lectures and in-class conversations with a series of questions that we have distilled from the readings and that we collectively use to orient our thinking. The questions are the ones that you see on this slide. And I'll read them.
Number one, what refinements have we introduced to the contrasting ideas of citizenship that we encountered in Michael Walzer, whose various sort of synthetic accounts of citizenship figured early on in the class, and Gail Yee, whose Asian-American interpretation of the book of Ruth had been instrumental in crystallizing alternative strands for the conceptualization of winning citizenship at the start of the semester. Number two, how elastic is the idea of citizenship in your eyes? How inelastic or constrained, as one of my students had noted, how bankrupt is this concept anyway? Number three, is citizenship a state or condition of being, becoming, doing? Number four, are you content with the term as a placeholder, general description, vessel of rights, or would you prefer to see it replaced by another? And here, as I reflect on Joel's remarks from a few minutes ago, I'm very taken with the prospect given a vibrant enactment in recent work that rights language is inadequate to or incommensurate with a more expansive concept of human migration essential to flourishing, and that this incommensurability or incompatibility should of necessity inform how we evaluate both the historical trajectory of citizenship and its contemporary inadequacies as a guarantor and preserver of the basic preconditions by which human beings can flourish. And finally, number five, is it appropriate to speak of a or the history of citizenship? Is there one history? Are there multiple parallel histories? And parenthetically, I've asked students whether this course on citizenship was a history course, what kind of course, and what's it exactly. In the final stretch of the citizenship class, we did some reading in contemporary discussions of queer rights, queer theory, and ongoing dilemmas in the practice of citizenship. And one of the texts that we consulted was a-- Yes. This is a very, very nice set of balloons that my daughter has just decided to bring to me for illustration. The text that we read was a text that had been introduced to me by Stefani Echeverria Fenn, who's the founder of the 37MLK10 committee and before that of the Sportula Microgrants Classic Students. What Stefani has done in a way that practically no one else I have encountered in my life has done is not just introduced me to a text but actually live out the text in its fullness and in no small part to that exemplification of the possibilities of this text that I thought it important to assign the text to my students in the fall of 2020.
There are two aspects of the text that I thought were worth flagging for my students. The first was its characterization of fear, specifically its linking of fear to the exercise of force in the pursuit of rights. Fear is the most powerful motivation. No one will give us what we deserve. Rights are not given. They are taken by force if necessary. But the most wrenching, for me, exposition of the dynamic between claiming citizenship, exercising dynamic coalitionary force in order to claim citizenship, and crucially, the very real menace to one's own well-being that comes in these moments of individual and collective striving toward citizenship comes a few pages later in the same pamphlet. And here, I'll be-- what, for my money, is one of the most remarkable passages of any text that seeks to reflect on the interconnectedness of forms of risk, responsibility, and citizenship.
Quote, "When I risk it all to be out, I risk it for both of us. When I risk it all and it works, which it often does if you would try it, I benefit and so do you when it doesn't work. I suffer and you do not. The screams are behind us. But, girl, you can't wait for other Dykes to make the world safe for you. Stop waiting for a better, more lesbian future. The revolution could be here if we started it."
What has been a source of amazement and at the same time of deep harrowing concern is the recognition that risk is distributed unequally in the striving for full citizenship. And that this unequal distribution of risk means, at a minimum, that those who are seeking and working with others to seek the realization of the full promise of citizenship are already exposed in their striving to forms of risk that directly menace their well-being, that are because of the systemic distribution of violence, more likely than not to lead to the compromising of their health and well-being in the longer term and to materially undermine the conditions for their flourishing and for their community's flourishing. So it would seem then that, as part of our analysis of risk, we have to face up to a paradox not too dissimilar to the one flagged in Joel's presentation.
On the one hand, communities on the receiving end of minoritized and structural violences arrive at the recognition that as part of their striving towards a more emancipatory and more emancipated future, they need to work towards the revolution. But this work not only exposes them to forms of risk that are asymmetrically distributed, it also potentially removes them from the field of civic agency in the longer term if enough of them are so substantially undermined by the workings of the carceral state, the immigrant carceral state, and other forms of institutionalized violence so as for their collective agency to be rendered ineffective at best. Here, we now come to another site of my abiding interest in thinking about citizenship as a stepping stone to something else, something better. Theories of fugitivity, memorably the vision of fugitivity outlined in Stefano Harney and Fred Moten's The Undercommons, Fugitive Planning and Black Studies. I am most taken with this exchange that occurs on pages 140 and 141 of Moten and Harney. And I'll read out the full text that's on the slide and then offer some brief comments on why I found it so edifying and so enriching to think with this text for the past few years. Fred Moten in this exchange says,
"I'm so concerned necessarily about the travails of the settler. The horrible difficulties that the settler imposes upon himself are not my first concern. So in the end, they are real things. It's the general imposition of severalty to use Theodore Roosevelt's legal terms that I'm trying to think about and undermine. He knew that possessive individualism, that the self possessed individual was as dangerous to Native Americans as a pox infested blanket. Civilization or more precisely civil society, with all its transformative hostility, was mobilized in the service of extinction of disappearance. This shit is genocidal. Fuck a home in this world If you think you had one."
Stefano Harney chimes in, "Just like the people we went to school with or maybe some of your Duke students or indeed settlers of the globe generally." And Moten continues, "Yeah, well, the ones who happily claim and embrace their own sense of themselves as privileged ain't my primary concern. I don't worry about them first. But I would love it if they got to the point where they had the capacity to worry about themselves because then maybe we could talk. That's like that Fred Hampton shit. He'd be like white power to white people, Black Power to Black people. What I think he meant is, look, the problematic of coalition is that coalition isn't something that emerges so that you can come help me, a maneuver that always gets traced back to your own interests. The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it's fucked up for you in the same way that we've already recognized that it's fucked up for us. I don't need your help. I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you too however much more softly, you stupid motherfucker, you know. But that position in which you have no place, no home, that you're literally off center, off the track, unlocatable, I think, it's important."
There are two insights from this exchange that I want to tee up for our discussion in the next few minutes. The first has to do with Moten's analysis of coalition and coalitionary politics, which I think is instrumental for those of us and generative for those of us who have been thinking about which kinds of coalitions to forge around undocumented and documented activism over the past few years. As Joel put it in the presentation earlier, we got to the point, some years ago, especially when looking at and assessing the landscape for activists initiated reform of seeing multiple Democratic candidates who each had a dreamer or a documented individual as a kind of mascot. And what was interesting and also, at the same time, so dejecting about the mascotification of dreamer and the documented folks was that by and large the focus of conversations around dreamers and the documented tended to involve an aspect of economy very, very much predicated on pity. It was the kind of pity that assumed, among other things, that the cause of the dreamer or of the documented was not at the same time also the cause of Democratic politics as a whole. It was understood as extrinsic to the workings of Democratic politics writ large or rather as a site where the beneficence and the benevolence of a few well-chosen actors could distribute some rewards to a relatively narrowly circumscribed of the undocumented population. But this is not a form of coalition politics that is likely to generate any meaningful or tangibly positive outcomes in the long run for the simple reason that it isolates the dreamer, dreamers and the documented from the agents of role that they can and should exercise in the pursuit of a politics more generally and also because, and this now gets us to the core of Moten's point because it assumes that, at the end of the day, the strivings, the sufferings, the disappointments as well as the joys and accomplishments of the dreamers and the documented are somehow cleanly separable from every other aspect and component of the Democratic polity, right?
So one of the points that I want to stress in talking about the dynamics of citizenship as they play out in the context of rumor and documented activism over the past decade plus. But the other point I want to emphasize, and this gets us of course to the final sentence in this exchange between Moten and Harney is that there are powerful and potentially quite consequential advantages that derive from our situatedness, our being literally off center, off the track, unlocatable. And as part of my own work in thinking about the experiences of indocumentation and undocumentarity that characterized my, my family's life in the United States, I had given thought to, as Joel has to, the paradoxes that in here in the condition of having at once documentation but also at the same time being repeatedly told that documentation is inadequate to the task of certifying one as a member of equality. And this paradox, which at an earlier point in my life, as I described in my memoir, I had seen as profoundly limiting and even incapacitating, came in time to become one of the greatest strengths of acting from the position that I occupied, at first, as an undocumented and now as a formerly undocumented person because it was only in the process of thinking about what it meant to feel like I had no place and no home despite having this documentation, this multiplex of documents that certified me as having a location within the polity, that I was able to imagine new coalitionary possibilities for myself. As part of this work, I have tried to think more about historical and contemporary examples of fugitivity.
And here I'll draw just on one illustration of this that has been meaningful for my purposes. One of the responsibilities that I've undertaken in recent years is the study of the reception of ancient Greece and Rome in the Caribbean and especially in the hispanophone Caribbean. And as part of this work, I spent a fair amount of time reflecting on the many and varied arcs of ancient Greece and Rome in the Dominican Republic, the land of my birth. And my daughter deciding to step on the desk and knock over my computer screen. So for part of this work, one of the most edifying encounters has been with the history of petite and grand Marronage or Maroon communities in colonial Santo Domingo. These are histories that invite a more expansive reassessment and contemplation of the status and role of fugitivity in Dominican culture in the long run. But they also, from my vantage point, also provide a springboard for thinking about how fugitive communities constitute themselves vis-a-vis hegemonic powers, in the case of colonial Santo Domingo, the Spanish empire, in the case of independent Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, the 19th, and 20th, and 21st century Dominican state. One of the figures who is often mentioned in conversations of fugitivity and fugitives in colonial Santo Domingo is Lemba, Captain Lemba whose exploits in leading an insurrection of enslaved and formerly enslaved persons in the 16th century formed the focus of a poem, a few verses in a poem by Juan de Castellanos entitled Elegias de Varones Ilustres de Indias. Here are the verses on Lemba's life. I'll read the Spanish verses first, and then their English translation.
[SPEAKING SPANISH]
Of the weightiest of the uprisings, the Negro Lemba was the principal leader and brought together more than 400 Negroes commanding them in virile manner. He was a Negro of perverse sentiments, daring, clever, strong, brave. And in his rebellion of many years, the land endured notable harms. Now from the perspective of the author of these verses, Lemba's example was not worth imitating and was, in fact, something to be held up for excoriation. This was a particularly sad moment from the vantage of the colonizer gaze that was responsible for fashioning these verses. But its representation of the accomplishments of the leader of this insurrection that turned colonial Santo Domingo upside down is, for me, incredibly generative of opportunities for thinking about the kinds of affects that would be appropriate and the forms of resistance that would be necessary to counteract the insidious forms of hegemony under which those of us who are Black and Brown in the States of contemporary oppression labor. There is also another dimension to Lemba's practice of fugitivity, which is that it had a much longer historical arc than merely one isolated rebellion since, as already briefly alluded to, practices of Marronage and the emergence of Maroon communities in colonial Santo Domingo, form an essential feature of the history of Hispaniola in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. This is a history that is narrated in texts such as Carlos Esteban Davis Los Guerrilleros Negros. And it is a history that continues to animate and infuse aspects of Dominican culture.
For my purposes, what's imperative about that history, is that it provides me a way of theorizing the experiences that characterize my art as an immigrant in diaspora and as an undocumented immigrant in diaspora as experiences that open up a space from which we can begin to imagine a state or forms of statehood that rather than generating incentives for the exclusion and marginalization of Black and Brown folk, instead invite, welcome, and support practices of fugitivity. But see here, we face another paradox, which is that, of course, the state that is intent on enforcing its dictates on the manifold communities that comprise it will always be opposed to those of us who seek to fashion an ethic of fugitivity that attends more carefully and insistently to the demands of our home communities than it does to the imperatives of the state. This has also meant that as part of the work that currently defines my crossroading of classical reception and histories of citizenship, I'm more motivated to attend to those forms of theory that can better encapsulate the degree to which, far from being a metaphor or a sort of cartographic representation of my experiences of citizenship, the island and insularity as sites for thinking about citizenship, move to the foreground of discussions about the predicament of the undocumented, the migrants, and the refugee.
But I'll leave it right here and end with this slide that shows you a six-year-old, soon to turn seven standing outside a bodega in the Bronx in the early 1990s. And that also features on it an image of the cover of my undocumented memoir as well as the various steps by which documentation of a particular kind became possible for me. I will wrap up by reiterating one of the points I mentioned earlier, which is that for those of us thinking about experiences of indocumentation, the question of citizenship and how to theorize citizenship has never been more vital, never been more urgent, and yet at the same time, citizenship itself is showing itself to be rather constraining and limiting as a concept for the realization of the forms of flourishing that Joel had alerted us to earlier. Thank you so much.
Alan Pelaez Lopez: Thank you to the both of you for these presentations. I took three pages of notes as both of you were speaking. And I'm kind of still processing both of yours. I'll start with Professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta just because you just spoke. I was really intrigued by your notion of fugitivity and kind of triangulating fugitivity not only in the States but also in the Caribbean and thinking more of fugitivity through an archipelago lens. And I often-- I think one of the things that is often missed in the US when thinking about the undocumented or the notion of papers is that papers have always been a large question when in regards to Black life in the US. And here I'm thinking about, for example, Frederick Douglass's narrative where he talks about how he escapes, right, and it's through false freedom papers, so that notion of papers as having something to do directly with the fugitive subject and also back thinking again with Joel Sati's work of illegalization, the ways in which fugitivity is illegalized in the US and then calls for this kind of law enforcement, right? So we see a lot of these notions of undocumented, of fugitivity, of illegality, statelessness arise kind of, like, in this particular moment in time. And now it's kind of extrapolated onto other foreign bodies or alien marked bodies. So I'm kind of just sitting with both of your presentations. And I would like to remind everybody that if you have a question, there is a Q&A box at the bottom of your screen. So you can type in your questions there. And for now, I would like to start with a question sent by Leti for Joel. Leti types, "I'm curious how you think about the call for open borders versus the call for abolition which resonates more and why?"
Joel Sati: Yeah. I saw that question on the chat, and I was like, that's a really interesting distinction. And the thing is, so open borders, at least in the political theory of immigration, there are a couple of thinkers-- there are few thinkers who are proponents of open borders. And I've thought of open borders as a little bit of a given personally. And I think there are a couple of issues that I have with open borders is that, usually, open borders and the right to migrate are similar enough. And the point of my dissertation writing where I'm really trying to get into a critique of rights and a critique of rights language. But usually, open borders is not painted in opposition with a lot of theorizing that usually doesn't question the liberal Democratic order. And so as well meaning as open borders is, I like abolition because I think it suggests something much more totalizing than just migration or than just open borders. So in contexts like abolishing the carceral state or abolishing ICE,I think, it suggests a fundamental rethinking of our world and how we are as individuals, as a community, and what constitutes those things. And so I would probably say, which one resonates more with me, I would probably say abolition.
Alan Pelaez Lopez: Thank you, Joel. I see you nodding your head, Dan-el. Do you want to add anything to that question on abolition versus open borders?
Dan-el Padilla Peralta: Yeah. I mean, this has been a fraught question and one that has occupied me for some time because whenever I've presented in a variety of contexts on either the specificities of my undocumented life or sort of attempts to theorize the predicament of the undocumented or historicizing the nature and forms of the immigrant carceral state, invariably, someone will raise the question whether in like a serious thoughtout way or in a not so serious way, well, are you calling for open borders? Like, how do you relate the demands of your ethical vision to the erasure of borders or at the very least, their significant opening up and how does that in turn affect your capacity to maintain and move possibly further the ends of the nation state and its sort of contemporary 20th or 21st century guise? I mean, these are all-- It's interesting to take up some of the objections that have been marshaled in sort of liberal camps. I'm not going to name them as liberal progressive camps because they're not to the concept of open borders. And Lucia says hi to everyone. So we've had works in the past decade or so that have argued that the maintenance of the nation state as a central vehicle for the allocation and entrenchment of rights and for the protection of Rights is incompatible with the full opening up of the borders. I don't think this is true. I would want to imagine a future that is very much a borderless future.
But something that Paul has said is sticking with me in a way swollen large. It is the case that we have entities that operate without any regard for borders whatsoever, like, for example, the immigration enforcement apparatus. So like we already have-- and we can sort of multiply the numbers and forms of entities that escape the bounds of borders already. And their activities are usually not easily legible according to the parameters of anything that we might call, even remotely, progressive ethical. So it would seem that, at the end of the day, the true summons is to an abolitionist space that embraces not just the demolition of borders in their current form but also, of course, the removal of the nation state in its current form. And if I were even to be more adventurous than is usually my want, I would say that capitalism too must bite the dust. But these are all sort of extensions of some of the commitments that come to mind as necessities for the advancement of a progressive ethic. I don't know, and this now gets us, I guess, to another question that we can take up.
And I'm grateful to Leti for praising my presenting under heroic conditions. It's as we sort of reflect and as I try to think about scenarios where the nation state might be repurposed or repackaged into something else, I am minded to look at historical instances where attempts at theorizing the capabilities of citizenship come into focus. But these are not usually the most heartwarming examples. So Leti has raised the question of the Insular Cases in the chat and, in the 2019 paper, I had tried to think about the relationship between the Insular Cases and discussions of the emergence of differentiated citizenship and sort of more broad historical comparisons that one might make in thinking about hearing citizenship first, second, and third class citizenship, and the dynamics of empire and imperial consolidation that routinely follow in the wake of and in collaboration with these efforts. But ultimately, the more sort of substantive concern that I've had lately has been with thinking about whether there are forms of citizenship that escape this kind of impulse to tier and differentiate or whether there's something that's sort of morphologically bound up with citizenship as a concept that makes it incapable of admitting a, truly, for lack of a better term, sort of egalitarian ethic. But that's all very half baked. I mean, I think, we need to do much more thinking both with the historical specificities of the Insular Cases as Leti has flagged and also with examples drawn from alternative traditions that do not necessarily hew to the sort of lineages charted out in some of the conventional accounts of citizenship that I referenced at the start of my presentation. I might say a Michael Walser or oriented citizenship.
Alan Pelaez Lopez: Thank you. I'm looking at the Q&A section right now. There are no questions. So I'm wondering if either of you have questions for one another based on the talks that you gave.
Dan-el Padilla Peralta: I could definitely ask a question. I mean, this is-- I was struck, Joel, by your referencing the killing of Mike Brown as a turning point, as an inflection point in some of the thinking that you were doing. And I wanted to think with you and see where you are in reflecting on the manifold ways in which the state, the American state, and other states depend vitally on this kind of sleight of hand. So to some communities, this takes the form of saying, you need the right documents. If you don't have the right documents, no luck for you. But for other communities, you have the documents, we can certify the documents as being the right ones. We will now ignore these documents. And to the communities that don't have the right documents, you will say, all you need is to get the documents, right? So this is a mutually interdependent game. You have to construct this fantasy that will make it possible for some communities to believe that what will be their saving grace, what will be their redemption is access to these documents. And at the same time in order to instrumentalize and weaponize oppression against other communities, you have to ignore that they hold the documents in the first place. So I wonder where you see your own work sort of lining up with this and how we sort of forge common cause and solidarity among different communities who are differentially impacted by these various forms of fantastical play with documents?
Joel Sati: Yeah. I think, that's a good question. I think-- So I'm going to go way back in terms of answering this. And I'll go to growing up as a Kenyan immigrant and being sort of what it meant to be socialized as a Kenyan in America. And I think-- so the one dimension of it is immigration is a taboo concept but also another dimension was there was a part of our socialization as diaspora that included separating ourselves from African-Americans and either in affect, in accent and behavior and whatnot. And so at least speaking from my own experience, you get the sense that a lot of the issues that are afflicting the African-Americans is endemic to them, right? And so you don't really see that they have papers, they're just treated this certain way, right? And so it's just like, well, OK, that seems to be a particular issue, that seems to be a cultural thing, and there's a way in which anti-Blackness is ingrained in you from a young age. And I always found that to be a little bit absurd because it's not like-- and this is a weird thing to say post something like SB 1070, like, a police officer wouldn't pull me over and ask me for my passport and then just be like Oh he's one of the good Blacks or he just-- and also being a part of the immigrant rights movement having so few Black people, I don't think I was able to really see that for quite a while, which is why the death of Mike Brown was a moment that was transformative for me because, at the time, I was also working on projects saying that undocumented immigrants should get papers and things of that nature. And I remember, like, really sitting with what had what had happened and it's important and thinking, well, what now, right?
And so And I was able to go back to my community and also, like, was able to, and thankfully, movements like the Black movement were able to come out in which we were pushing back on anti-Blackness and pushing back on just papers as kind of being the limit of what we could ask for, which was, in many ways, why it was so disappointing to see the mass organization, that's a really great term by the way, of dreamers in the 2016 campaign because they were pushing a kind of immigration reform that was increasing enforcement against not only people with criminal records. But the idea is that there's going to be this constant legitimation that immense violence was going to be the way to respond to certain communities. And so, in a weird sense, papers became irrelevant. And I thought then, OK, and so the kind of, I don't know, wedge that's been drawn between Black people and undocumented people, in many ways, putting themselves as oppositions be it for jobs or other resources seems to really just elide the fact that, yeah, you could go to one community and say, well, all you need are the right papers. And you go to another community to say you have the right papers, you just need something else, whatever, like we're still-- like, those papers don't matter all as this kind of really borderless violence, part of the same apparatus.
Alan Pelaez Lopez: Thank you, Joel. I think I'd like to chime in for a sec. I mean, that's also reminding me of the ways in which Mike Brown's death and Trayvon Martin's death also puts into question the legal category of good moral character. And for whom it's good moral character and the ways in which good moral character also insinuates non-consensual performance contracts, right, where Black subjects are surveilled through this valence that one has never consented into, right, because citizenship for at least the Black American is an assigned politically produced status. And for the migrant citizenship, at some point our papers becomes like something that is asked for and you see these, like, two social contracts that are in conversation. But the historical formations of both of the contracts seem to not touch but there are so many touching points when we're thinking about race, when we're thinking about those who are undocumented and also descendants of enslaved people. So right now, I'm thinking, for example, the memoir, Sobrevivientes Ciudadanos Del Mundo by Pascal Ustin Dubuisson who writes about being a Haitian migrant and being undocumented in 10 Latin American countries. There's a portion in his memoir or autobiography where he talks about drinking water from the river, I believe, in Costa Rica or Panama, I can't remember which of the nations. And that's when he realizes like, oh, like, am I also drinking part of my ancestors? And then he ends up getting some form of recognition in Mexico and is now undocumented in the US, so the 11th country. And, Joel, when you're talking about-- when you were talking about Mike Brown, it really honed in on this of, like, the Black condition in the Americas as always being in relationship to multiple contracts that are not actually written out. So legally, it's incredibly difficult to fight in a court of law or to dismantle them because they exist in a social imaginary. So those are things I'm kind of thinking about in relationship to both of your presentations and the question that Dan-el posted.
And then I saw, Joel, that you also added in the chat, the legality is a kind of original sin and attaching to people makes them fundamentally opposition to citizenry and incapable of citizenship. And we think about a lot of the writing in the 19th century dealing with the coexistence of freed slaves and white people, the similar issue of iincapability of citizenship and coexistence within Citizenry/whiteness. OK, any final words from either of you?
Joel Sati: I'm still sort of really finding out that I was able to be on the same sort of-- the same digital space with Dan-el. And thanks to the Center for Race and Gender, Leti and Alan. It's always good to see you. And yeah. Thanks again.
Dan-el Padilla Peralta: Thanks to you all. It's such a delight to be in this space. Obstructions and hindrances, notwithstanding. And I'm just so grateful to Alan for making this possible. Ariana and Leti for facilitating this, and my daughter for counting. I'm going to write the number four. I'm being told I have to write the number four on a piece of paper. And Joel for the solidarity that extends across time and that will extend into the future.
Alan Pelaez Lopez: So thanks to all of you and to all our guests for attending. Thank you so much, everybody. Have a good evening. And thank you for joining us at the Center for Race and Gender.