Oral Presentation Session

Reviewed by: Society for Urban, National and Transnational/Global Anthropology

Of interest to: Practicing and Applied Anthropologists, Students

Primary Theme: Immigration/Migration/Citizenship

Secondary Theme: Resistance

(3-0190) Resisting Immobilization, Mobilizing Resistance

Fear of migrants and refugees is linked to an emergent politics of state retrenchment and enclosure marked by border militarization, racialized nationalism, exclusionary immigration law and policy, and violence against people who seek to cross the sociospatial boundaries they create. These trends mirror state withdrawal from global governance of trade and finance, environmental regulation, and human rights agreements. At the same time, the forces compelling people to move – poverty, exclusion, violence and oppression – are as powerful as ever. People who cross national borders find themselves at the intersection of forces of mobility and immobility, at once subject to state projects to demobilize and systems of compulsory mobility that force people to migrate, flee, or be deported. In this era of global expulsions (Saskia Sassen) and walled states (Wendy Brown), mobile people navigate the contradictory forces impelling movement and state attempts to immobilize by using mobility as a means of survival and a tool of resistance. The centrality of spatial control to state power inevitably produces spatialized forms of resistance as people evade, subvert, and resist through attempts at autonomous movement, individual and collective. Thus movement, both physical and political (movements for movement), becomes central to understanding power, inequality, and the changing social worlds they produce.
This panel examines the experiences of mobile people as they confront forced mobility and imposed immobilization. The papers discuss mass deportation and its effects on families in the U.S., the struggles of undocumented students pursuing education, the violence visited upon Central American migrants as they transit Mexico and the U.S., and the ways indigenous migrants use language as a form of resistance. What emerges through these ethnographic projects is a conversation about mobility, power, and the agency of mobile people facing state violence.

Organizer(s)

• Beth Baker

  Professor
  California State University, Los Angeles

Presenter(s)

• Beth Baker

  Professor
  California State University, Los Angeles

Chair(s)

• ChorSwang Ngin

  Professor
  California State University, Los Angeles

Presenter(s)

• ChorSwang Ngin

  Professor
  California State University, Los Angeles

• Katie Dingeman

  Cal State L.A.

• Alejandro Villalpando, Jr

  University of California, Riverside

• Paula Ayala

  California State University Los Angeles

• Claudio Hernandez

  California State University, Los Angeles, Department of Anthropology

Discussant(s)

• Ester Hernandez

  CSULA

Presentations:

• 8:00 AM - 8:15 AM

  Movements for Movement: The Limits of Deportation
  Beth Baker – California State University, Los Angeles
• 8:15 AM - 8:30 AM

  The Moral Community as Resistance
  ChorSwang Ngin – California State University, Los Angeles
• 8:30 AM - 8:45 AM

  Gendered Entrapment, Resilience, and Resistance among Central Americans Deported from the U.S.
  Katie Dingeman – Cal State L.A.
• 8:45 AM - 9:00 AM

  Settler-Colonial Collusions: Central American Children and the Borders of Humanity
  Alejandro Villalpando, Jr – University of California, Riverside
• 9:00 AM - 9:15 AM

  Central American Migration from the Northern Triangle: Challenging US-Mexico Hegemonic Relations by Paula Ayala
  Paula Sofia Ayala – California State University Los Angeles
• 9:15 AM - 9:30 AM

  Transnational Oaxacan Indigenous Languages as Sites of Resistance in 21st Century North America
  Claudio R. Hernandez – California State University, Los Angeles, Department of Anthropology
• 9:30 AM - 9:45 AM

  Discussion
  Ester Hernandez – CSULA