The Violence of Citizenship in the Making of Refugees

DOI 10.1215/01642472-7794343 © 2019 Duke University Press Sixtynine thousand unaccompanied minors from Central America crossed the USMexico border in 2014.1 This dramatic spike in numbers retrospectively marked the beginning of the refugee crisis that continues unabated through today’s “zero tolerance” policy under the Trump administration. This crisis makes evident several artificial boundaries: between the United States and its “enemies” to the south, between private reproductive labor and public productive labor, and between academic fields like African American and Latinx studies. The Mara Salvatrucha gangs in Central America, singled out by Trump as a supreme threat to US sovereignty and security, grow in dominance by providing transportation and distribution services between South American drug producers and their US and Canadian consumers. The cycle of drug production, distribution, and consumption is a transnational affair and cannot be reduced to a binational problem resolved by simply sealing off the USMexico border. The Maras belie a temporal boundary as well, set between the Cold War past of the United States and its neoliberal present, as they embody the traumatic legacy of USbacked military dictatorships and neocolonial intervention in Central America. Most significant, Central American violence demonstrates the artificiality of bounded citizenship and its liberal promise of security within nationstate sovereignties, as refugees arriving at the US border requesting asylum make evident the contingent nature of our security on their insecurity. The specifically gendered nature of the violence they flee contradicts the publicprivate divide by foregrounding the centrality of reproductive labor for the global drug economy. Finally, The Violence of Citizenship in the Making of Refugees