CHAPTER 3

Relationality as Resistance

In this chapter I expose workings of racial capitalism through autoethnographical accounts of my migration journey from Mexico to the United States as well as through detailed lifelong ethnography and testimonials from my extended Mexican immigrant community in Washington State. I center our story as Mexicans of Indigenous descent who have been displaced from our history (via modern nationalistic projects of subject formation) and from our community and land in Mexico (via colonial and neocolonial practices that produce simultaneous displacement and immobility) and in turn have been legally criminalized and trapped in exploitative jobs in what is now the United States. As I tell our story, I embed a racial political-economic analysis of displacement within an investigation of subject formations. This structural analysis of displacement, inequality, and impoverishment through racial-capitalist processes and iterations of liberal governance and its identity projects disorganizes liberal poverty knowledge that focuses on individual actions and blurs structures of power—past and present. While previous work on racial capitalism has focused on anti-Blackness (Bledsoe and Wright 2019; Robinson 2000; Reese 2018; Sharpe 2016), my analysis shows how practices of de-Indianization work alongside anti-Blackness to further entrench institutional racism, producing displacement, bordering, and illegality. More specifically, our story as displaced Mexicans of Indigenous descent demonstrates how the national project of mestizaje, ideologies of development following Western models, and multiple bordering practices come together to produce and reproduce the privileged individual, the “legal” liberal citizen (whitened colonizers), and its constituent Other, the “illegal alien” (displaced Indigenous-descended peoples).¹ In turn this production of “illegal” nonpersonhood authorizes forced and illegalized mobility, further distancing us from our land, family, and communities, and traps immigrant communities into labor exploitation, while making these harms appear to be logical and necessary. More than the deportability threat in our everyday life (De Genova 2002), illegality produces detrimental intergenerational and relational harms. These vital insights, resulting from structures of power that produce impoverishment and inequality, uncover the profound limitations (and misinformation) of liberal poverty knowledge that focuses on individual action and assumes that all people have freedom of choice. Overall, our grounded story reveals how logics of white supremacy justify geographies of oppression along the Mexico-to-U.S. migration journey and facilitate conditions for racial capitalism and ongoing expansion of the settler-colonial empire.

Simultaneously, Mexican Indigenous descent communities, including mine, continue to enact relational ways of being and knowing—which are passed from generation to generation, adapted and readapted—to produce meaningful, dignified, and humane life in the midst of state-sponsored violence across space. My structural critique writes history from the perspective of Indigenous-descent and displaced peoples as a way to produce something meaningful for us (Smith 2013; Valencia 2019a; Wilson 2008). I bring together political-economic processes with embodied experiences of displacement from our land, our history, and ourselves. While disorganizing liberal knowledge is important, my larger goal here is to strengthen our collective consciousness through a deeper understanding about where our condition (of displacement) comes from and how we might move toward decolonial futures.

The stories I share offer an example of resistance by displaced Indigenous descent communities through enacting communal relationality across space and generations. Indeed, such relational communality performs a level of disengagement from the harms of racial state oppressions that insist on using their power, policies, and laws to harm people both in Mexico and in the United States (Valencia 2019a).

Through this chapter, I tell my story, my family’s, and that of my community, of living with forced im/mobilities, political economies, and ideological projects (e.g., of having been made to learn the fictions of history of nation and subjecthood making) that racial capitalism, white supremacy, and settler colonialism depend upon. I also offer an example of ongoing everyday life resistance from Mexican immigrant communities that are thriving under state oppression in the United States. My work draws on and contributes to Critical Latinx Indigeneities, which is rooted in the relation between displacement of Indigenous communities from Latin America, mass incarceration of immigrants (many of whom are Indigenous) in the United States, and ongoing settler-colonial imperial expansion on Indigenous lands made “empty” via displacement in Latin America (Saldaña-Portillo 2017). I offer our story as an example of how settler imperial expansion also operates in rural communities of Mexico. Our community has been made mestiza and reveals how the processes of mestizaje and legal bordering are important factors that facilitate further land dispossession and intergenerational separation.

As I narrate our story, theory explains our life and our life becomes theory. Considering that ours is one of thousands of similar (but not identical) experiences, I begin with autoethnography to narrate in detail our story of experiences and struggles across borders. First, our story includes displacement in places of origin in the context of racial political economy resultant from U.S. imperialism and internal colonialism—ongoing racism that began over five hundred years ago (Cusicanqui 2010; Gonzalez Casanova 1965)—subject formation that centers white supremacy, reinforces Spanish colonial racialized social orders, and enables U.S. imperial expansion. Second, our story includes the ways in which the legal border and U.S. immigration law trap people as exploitative labor in the United States, separating them and future generations from our lands (and community), making land “empty” for future foreign investment. Overall, my essay reveals ongoing state violence against Indigenous descent communities as it constitutes legally exploitative labor and empty lands for ongoing settler-colonial expansion. Nevertheless, such communities continually resist colonial and imperial violence. Since the focus of this chapter is on migration, I conclude with an empirical and theoretical example of everyday practices of disruption from communities that are thriving in spite of oppressive norms in the United States.

These practices demonstrate that resistance to racial capitalism is partly accomplished through communal politics of solidarity that transform citizenship from an individualized private property—as an expression of personhood as per liberal normalized logics (Harris 1993; Macpherson and Cunningham 2011; Porter 2014; Roy 2017)—into a community tool that enables connections of families across space, colonizing borders and generations. Such connections reinforce community relations and trans-spatial belonging, enabling more relational, meaningful, humane, and social life—a kind of personhood that exceeds (and contradicts) the limits of white propertied personhood within racial capitalism. In this vein, my work contributes to Chicana feminists’ call for women of color to write our own stories in ways that empower our communities and also unveil the workings of state violence (Alarcón 1990; Aldama 2001; Blackwell 2011). I am also in conversation with Black scholars who indicate that the oppressed, even as they are marginalized, produce and experience spaces of thriving (McKittrick 2006; McKittrick and Woods 2007). In addition, I engage with Indigenous theorization of relationality, codependence, and networks of care (Daigle and Ramírez 2019; Martínez Luna 2015; Simpson 2017; Smith 2013; Wilson 2008). Overall, this chapter contributes to this collection in two ways: it (1) interrupts and challenges liberal poverty knowledge and (2) highlights a form of everyday resistance from Indigenous-descent immigrant communities. This resistance is informed by knowledge rooted in collective ways of being and knowing that contradict liberal forms of propertied personhood. Drawing on Indigenous, decolonial methods (Smith 2013; Wilson 2008), my goal is to write stories (and histories) from our perspective as Indigenous descent dis/placed peoples and also to shift the gaze toward seeing ourselves as people with agency whose ways of being and knowing are powerful and crucial to our resistance from the dehumanizing harms of racial capitalism.

Racial Political Economy of Displacement

These were my mother’s repeated painful words as my father would make rushed plans to come to El Norte again: “Por qué te tienes que ir otra vez? Llevanos contigo! Yo quiero conocer El Norte—Ese lugar que nos ha robado a ti” (Why do you have to leave again? Take us with you! I want to get to see El Norte—That place that has stolen you from us). His journey was due in large part to constant decreases in the value of corn (which our extended family cultivates in our rural community) and a shortage of jobs in Mexico, especially after the debt crisis of 1986 and increasing neoliberal policies initiated, encouraged, and enforced by the United States through the International Monetary Fund and other powerful Washington-based institutions (Clapp 2012; Lawson 2010; Sparke 2013). In the middle of the argument my father would remind my mother that he would never take us to the United States without papers because crossing por el cerro (through the mountains) was extremely dangerous. However, he was undocumented and thus risked his own life every time (Andreas 2012; Nevins 2007; Urrea 2004; Valencia 2017). Getting a visa was (and is) almost impossible and overly expensive. At the time of writing, a nonrefundable fee of about two hundred dollars is required as part of the application package (see https://mx.usembassy.gov). Nevertheless, in Mexico over half of the population lives in poverty (Gonzalez 2019), and such poverty as well as increased violence—resulting in large part from colonialism and U.S. imperial power over Mexico—are precisely the conditions people are often forced to run away from (Bacon 2008; Barajas 2009; Boehm 2011; Nevins 2007; Valencia 2017; Wright 2011). The relative instability of Mexico (and Central America) with the United States ensures that people almost exclusively seek migration to El Norte. And yet the people who need visas the most cannot afford to even apply. In addition, such visas are mostly denied because the U.S. consulate requires proof of wealth to qualify. Yet impoverishment, illegalization, increased violence, denial of documentation, and the dangers impoverished people encounter in the migration journey are all direct consequences of government policy. However, most of these conditions often seem to be disconnected and normalized and get framed as consequences of individual action(s) through mainstream discourses of self-help, deservingness, and irrational decision making.

Soon after marrying my mother, my father migrated to the United States, always promising that it would be the last time. However, that last time never materialized. A few months after returning from his two-year-long trip to the United States, plans to migrate would repeat due to extremely low wages, ongoing lack of employment, and constant devaluation of agrarian crops in relation to other essential goods. This condition is rooted, in large part, in the search for Western modernity. Increased poverty and violence have been ongoing challenges and struggles, especially for campesinos, since Mexico’s independence because structures of power and racial logics stayed the same (Menchaca 2001). In the latter period, Mexico formally began its race toward industrialized “development” following the model of the West. This mode frames household farming, and thus rural mestiza and Indigenous communities, as backward and as impeding progress and modernity (Bonfil Batalla and Dennis 1996; Stetson 2012; Villalba 2013). Sylvia Wynter’s letters reveal how soon after our political independence—especially since the 1950s—we

fell into the mimetic trap . . . because the West is now going to reincorporate us as neocolonialists, and thereby mimetically, by telling us that the problem with us wasn’t that we’d been imperially subordinated, wasn’t that we’d been both socioculturally dominated and economically exploited, but that we were underdeveloped. The West said: “Oh, well, no longer be a native but come and be Man like us! Become homo economicus!” While the only way we could, they further told us, become un-undeveloped, was by following the plans of both their and our economists. The catch was that our economists, like the distinguished Caribbean economist Sr. Arthur Lewis, had been educated in British imperial universities, like many of us. (Wynter, quoted in McKittrick 2015, 20–21)

While Wynter was writing about the Caribbean, she was making a broader argument about colonial structures that reveals ways in which ahistorical and depoliticized Western-centric discourses of the problem (undevelopment) and solution (development) become dominant and normalized not only in the Caribbean but also in Mexico and the so-called developing world in general.

Mexico (as the entire “developing world”) is blamed for their own lack of “development” and thus poverty (Escobar 1995). Mexico also fell into the mimetic trap and continues its determination (originally imposed by Spain) to no longer be native in order to achieve development. This meant focusing on supporting industrialization and urbanization while disregarding household farming, which was seen as representing a “backward” way of life (Bonfil Batalla and Dennis 1996; Stetson 2012). Such is the power of Western development discourse that the Mexican government encouraged campesinos—those more linked to Indigenous way of life (Alanís Enciso 2017; Bonfil Batalla and Dennis 1996; Rubin 2014)—to migrate to the United States during the Bracero Program (between 1942 and 1964).² A goal of Bracero was for campesinos to learn industrial and “modern” farming methods and then bring these skills back to Mexico in support of development and modernity (Alanís Enciso 2017). This way of thinking reinforces Western superiority while also producing the idea that rural communities’ knowledge is backward and irrelevant. Indeed, bracero derives from the Spanish word brazo (arm), meaning that the program targeted arms for physical, “unskilled,” and thus cheap labor. In the twenty-two years of the program’s existence, five million people, mostly from rural communities, worked as braceros (Calavita 1992). In this case, people were (and are) encouraged to move across borders to fulfill seasonal demands for cheap and disposable labor.³ Seasonal visas, currently granted under the h-2a visa program, afford power for employers to choose their workers according to their productivity levels. Once the worker’s youthfulness is extracted, they can easily be discarded, not hired again, and prevented from entering the United States. They grow older back in their rural communities without retirement or medical benefits from the United States. This form of laboring reproduces impoverishment. It legally constrains people from demanding fair wages or better working conditions or obtaining social benefits—although contributions toward social benefits are automatically deducted from their paychecks. This form of laboring is possible due to ongoing neoliberal trade agreements and austerity programs of dispossession and organized abandonment across colonizing borders. As such, neocolonial controls over labor, mobility, identity, and nationality work to reproduce and sustain a racial political economy of exploitation. This form of laboring is not due to individual decisions.

The Mexican government constantly reduces social spending to comply with U.S.-imposed austerity programs (Clapp 2012; Cupples 2013). One consequence is the lack of educational investment, especially in rural communities. The highest education level in El Rancho (rural community in Mexico where I resided through age seventeen) is tele-secundaria (middle school via televised lectures), with one teacher for three grades. As a consequence, children don’t receive a strong foundation to move onto high school or higher education, making it impossible for youth to compete for the few available stable jobs. Also, with NAFTA in 1994, the Mexican market was inundated with highly subsidized products including corn, while austerity programs prevented the government from subsidizing its farmers. As a result, rural communities like El Rancho that rely on this crop for consumption and sale could no longer compete with the artificially low prices from the United States and Canada (Clapp 2012; Bacon 2008). It’s cheaper to buy than to grow corn, beans, tomatoes, and other basic foods that rural communities grow. The price of agrarian products keeps decreasing in relation to the prices of gas, clothes, shoes, soap, and other essential and industrialized goods. As Bonfil Batalla and Dennis (1996) indicate, Mexico, which invented corn, now has to buy it! At the time of writing this essay, and after about seventy years of Western development projects, over eleven million people earn a minimum wage of Mex$123.22 per day (US$6.36). These wages reflect an increase of 20 percent in January 2020; however, with most groceries and essential products being comparable to U.S. prices, these wages aren’t nearly enough to survive. For example, a kilo of beef currently costs around Mex$200.00, equivalent to approximately US$11.00 (almost twice the daily minimum wage!); a jar of VapoRub (a topical medicine popular in my community) is currently about Mex$90.00, or US$5.00 (almost the entire day’s earnings); gas is often more expensive in Mexico than in the United States; and the list goes on and on. These are examples of everyday scarcities produced through unequal trade and power relations.

These unequal trade and power relations across national borders, coupled with austerity program, make places unlivable, forcing people to move, to embark on the journey to El Norte in search of their lost jobs (Nevins 2007), a journey that has been made dangerous through legal criminalization of (and legal barriers to) mobility. Government policy produces both the conditions and need to move but also legally prevents people from moving. Thus, impoverished people are simultaneously pushed to, and legally prevented from, moving (Walia 2021). Those who survive crossing the deadly buffer zone we call the U.S.-Mexico border become criminalized and captive labor for the benefit of the already rich in the United States (De Genova 2004). Indeed, a criminalized life is often the only future for impoverished people. Either their presence in the United States is criminalized through the immigration law (Cacho 2012), or they’re criminalized in Mexico through the war on drugs—a war encouraged and supported by the United States through programs such as the Merida Initiative, which depicts them as drug dealers (Corva 2008; Mercille 2011; Paley 2014; Wright 2011). This way, the murdering of thousands of impoverished people continues with impunity as they’re linked to this illicit business and thus framed as deserving to die, or as unlawful noncitizens, nonpersons who broke the law when crossing the U.S.-Mexico border (Valencia 2019b). As noncitizens under the racialized migration law, they’re labeled as already criminals in the United States (Cacho 2012). Such conditions restrict movement (both physical and social), trapping people in exploitative jobs in the United States, and determine who is and who isn’t deserving of protection by white-supremacist laws made by and for whites.

As my father was forced to engage in the deadly journey to the North and became a criminalized noncitizen whose deportable labor enriched the already rich, my mother, who never attended school, was essentially a single mom working in the informal economy, selling food in the streets. My four older siblings and I would help her from a very young age. Mine was (and is) hardly the only case. Thousands of children in Mexico and Central America must help from a very young age by working in the informal economy (Aufseeser 2015). Also, similar to my case, it is common for children to grow up without one or both parents because they’re forced to migrate to the United States in search for jobs lost to the negative effects of ongoing economic, political, and social-imperial processes that create unlivable conditions. In the meantime, public schools—as part of the apparatus of the state—continue to play a significant role in the pursuit of Western development and liberal personhood by erasing/negating the Indian in us.

“No Longer Be a Native but Come and Be Man Like Us!”

Through public education we learned that our Indigenous languages are “dialects,” not languages, that our Indigenous knowledges are “myths”—unreal, unscientific, subjective—because Indigenous peoples had a different and supposedly irrational cosmology and way of seeing the world. At elementary school I was taught that Christopher Columbus was a hero who “discovered” us when he arrived in the Americas by accident. Little did I know that we lived not in America but by Tzintzuntzan, in Purépecha territory, beside the Anáhuac or Tenochtitlán (Aztec Empire); more broadly, we lived in what Kuna people currently refer to as the continent of Abya Yala (Valle Escalante 2014). As Mignolo (2005) indicates, for the people in this land, America didn’t exist. It was not a place on the map waiting to be “discovered.” Rather, America was invented by the colonizers who gave it that name. I learned that our Indigenous ancestors are all gone/dead and now we are all a new race of mestizos, thanks to Columbus who “rescued” us. Now we supposedly have Spanish blood and are closer to Western in modernity and civilization. Consequently, we learned to celebrate our buried past and to detach ourselves from “them,” framed as “Indigenous backward,” that is, us. October 12, the day that Columbus arrived, has been declared El Día de la Raza, a national holiday in celebration of his arrival, which enabled the possibility of a new and “better” race— the mestizo. I used to participate unquestioningly in parades organized as part of such celebrations by our public schools and government.

At age of seventeen, I along with my mother and one of my sisters finally migrated to the United States and reunited with our father and extended community in Pasco, Washington, a city where over 70 percent of the population identifies as Hispanic (Latinx), mostly Mexicans. While my three older siblings would’ve loved to join us, they couldn’t because they were already over the age of eighteen, which disqualified them by the time our application for documents, submitted by my father years earlier, was processed. This example illustrates how racist immigration laws and bordering practices produce legalized separation of families and communities. Making the journey to the United States converted us into immigrants of color. As Mexican mestizas of Indigenous descent, we became marked the “other,” again! Saldaña-Portillo (2017) asks, “When does an Indian stop being Indian?” Inspired by this question I wonder, is that through miscegenation with whites? Through mestizaje as an imposed identity? When one learns a distorted history and is forced to forget our Indigenous languages? Or when one moves across the colonizer’s national borders? In effect, our mobility is framed as migrating, unlike the mobility of white Europeans and their descendants (Rana 2010; Walia 2014). We are othered in Mexico as “backward” campesinos by the Mexican elites and the oligarchy who have bought into and/or are mandated through U.S. imperial policies to adopt a mimetic development model. We are also legally criminalized and discriminated against in the United States by white settlers and liberal governance (Camacho 2008; Corva 2008; De Genova 2004; Cacho 2012; Ngai 2004; Spade 2011). Being Mexican in the United States is a derogatory identity (Cacho 2012). This identity is attached not only to a country but also to a racialized category. After the invasion of Mexico, the United States denied most Mexicans citizenship due to our hypervisible Indigeneity and thus our nonwhiteness (Menchaca 1993). This continues currently as our presence— our hypervisible Indigenous presence—in the United States is synonymous with the “illegal alien” (De Genova 2004). In turn, such othering and bordering across space ensures our distancing and displacement from our land and some forms of life.

The racist political-economic relations laid out in the preceding section are enabled by historical projects of racial formation and ideologies of the nation. This section briefly traces how these racial projects secure white supremacy in the formation of the Mexican nation and continue to be reproduced through institutions of liberal governance (e.g., public schools). La Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP, the Secretariat of Public Education), created in 1921 by Mexican president Álvaro Obregón, controls teaching materials in public schools. José Vasconcelos—a creole born in Oaxaca from French and Spanish parents—was named head of the SEP. While Vasconcelos was not of mixed race, he believed that the ongoing mixing of races would produce a superior race, the cosmic race (Vasconcelos 1997). He considered Indigenous as inferior and backward and the Spanish as superior and rescuers through their white race and religion. Nevertheless, he warned against imitating the Western model of material modernity. During his leadership in the SEP, art flourished, murals narrating the story of Mexico were painted, and education reached rural communities. However, the knowledge disseminated was (and continues to be) distorted and told through the European eye because Vasconcelos deemed Indigenous as inferior.

As a result, most people in Mexico know very little about ourselves (Bonfil Batalla and Dennis 1996). Most have learned a limited history written by and for the West, where the West is the expert and hero who saves the “backward” other (Said 1979). Often, kids are bullied for looking Indigenous or for speaking a native language. And so the modern and mestizo national identity, which conceals ongoing racism, has been successfully imposed and normalized. Just the mere fact of learning Spanish qualifies people as mestizos because supposedly they’ve “mixed” their culture by adopting the Spanish language. However, not knowing Spanish represents a barrier for accessing higher education and the few stable and better-paid jobs that might become available. As such, the majority of Mexicans, including my rural campesina community, have adopted this “modern” identity and buried part of our Indigenous “past” (Bonfil Batalla and Dennis 1996). Indeed, Mestizaje is a national state project of denial as it obscures Indigenous ways of life and their/our presence (Cusicanqui 2010). This national Mestizo identity also conceals white supremacy, settler colonialism, and ongoing neocolonial processes. In other words, through mestizaje, everyone is supposed to be the same, including white descendants who continue to inhabit white-supremacist power. This invalidates challenges to settler colonialism as now, supposedly, we are all equal and therefore are all both colonizer and colonized. Indeed, through teaching this distorted history in schools the state can deny colonization and its erasure of Afro-Mexican populations, thus seeking to negate Indigenous life by “purifying” our blood through whiteness (Martínez 2008; Smith 2013).

These racist political-economic processes that explain contemporary displacement are rooted in colonial social organizing that draws from (and sustains) white supremacy for the past 530 years. The quest to eradicate the Indian in Mexico has been an ongoing white supremacy project since colonization from Spain, and it’s now combined with settler colonialism and imperialism from the United States. As such, mimicking Western development is part of the ongoing white supremacy pursuit to “save” the nonwhite from our supposed lack of humanity by eradicating the “nonhuman” part of us, our Indian and our Blackness. Mexican migrants to the United States then experience the related, but distinct, white-supremacist U.S. racial formation, as seen in histories of racial exclusion and bordering, as I discuss below.

Becoming the “Other” in El Norte

Soon after the arrival of our family in the United States, in order to help pay for the cost of our trip, my sister and I applied to work in restaurants and stores. But ability with English and previous experience were requirements, so we were told. We had no choice but to work in the agricultural industry: planting, picking, and sorting trees for one company; then planting onions for another; then sorting asparagus for yet another. Within six months we moved through many different jobs. Given their seasonal nature and the need to pay off the loan that funded our trip, while also contributing to living expenses, we had no choice but to work at IBP, now Tyson’s Wallula beef plant (a fancy name for the slaughterhouse). This was by far the worst job I’ve ever done, but nevertheless it was full-time, stable employment. This slaughterhouse employs about fourteen hundred people—many of whom are Mexican immigrants or of Mexican descent. Women are often placed in lower-level, lower-paid jobs—supposedly lighter work but requiring faster movement of hands—and are rarely promoted. There are clear hierarchies in this corporation where the dirty job of killing the cow for the privileged consumer takes place (see Pachirat 2011). The few top managerial jobs are occupied by white males. Middle management positions are mostly granted to men and some white women; jobs of lower ranks are generally performed by women of color. I was placed in a lower-level and low-paid but high-velocity job. Some women from my community have performed this job for over twenty years. Instead of being promoted, they tend to get demoted as their hands and bodies are permanently worn out through the years and thus are stuck in the same position or given even lower-rank jobs. Similar to the women who work in maquiladoras in the northern Mexican border (Wright 2001), the lives of women of color are extracted as they add value to the meat being processed in the slaughterhouse. This work is out of sight and out of mind for consumers. As Pachirat (2011) indicates, invisibility justifies much violence toward the animals and the workers behind the gray walls of the slaughterhouse.

I was able to run away from these backbreaking jobs by attending upper-level education classes, after overcoming a series of barriers and with the support from my community and beyond. Sadly, the majority of Mexican people, many of whom are de-Indianized mestiza/os/es, cannot do this because of racist white-supremacist laws that work to legally keep some people under vulnerable and impoverished conditions. Inability to escape exploitative work is also due to structurally violent conditions suffered in places of origin, which forced many to migrate with few resources.

Since its foundation, the United States has depicted various populations, including poor whites, Africans, Indigenous, Chinese, Japanese, Southeast Asians, and Mexicans, as perfect for physical “unskilled” labor through racial othering discourses (Calavita 1992; Robinson 2000; Gilmore 2002; Nevins 2002).⁴ Such depictions enable legal criminalization, discrimination, and exploitation of targeted racialized populations. For the past century—especially since the Bracero Program in 1942—Mexican (and broadly Latinx) communities have been the targeted group. Soon after the Bracero Program ended in 1964, this same population became illegalized through immigration laws (De Genova 2004). Over 50 percent of the eleven million undocumented immigrants in the United States are Mexicans. As Cacho (2012) argues, legally, they have no rights to have rights. They’ve been excluded from protection but not from punishment under the rule of law (Cacho 2012; De Genova 2004). However, lack of legal documentation forces many into exploitative jobs that reproduce impoverishment.

My story so far has illustrated that global colonial violence is justified by racial logics imposed by Western societies across Mexico and what is currently known as the United States.⁵ Racial state violence in Mexico and in the United States prepares many to become cheap labor and become trapped in exploitative jobs.

Trapped: The Pain of Immobility

While my father was able to see his family by engaging in circular migration as an undocumented immigrant from the 1970s to the 1990s, increasing criminalization and punishment of the presence and mobility of people of color have made circular migration almost impossible. For instance, at the time of my writing, the Trump administration’s proposed funding for a border wall amounted to $18.4 billion, for additional construction of 882 miles of wall along the 2,000-mile border (Miroff 2020). While deterrents like this will not completely stop people from trying to cross because conditions of displacement have not been addressed (Ramos 2002), such barriers, in combination with increased technological intelligence, militarization, and organized crime, do increase both the danger and the costs of crossing.

As such, legal separation of families continues to be intensified across space. As Nita explains, “La razón principal para tener papeles, es nada mas para ir a ver a mi familia!” (The most important reason to have papers, is only to be able to go see my family) (personal interview, 2016). The pain that comes with the inability to go back to Mexico to see family and community there is palpable in my mixed-status Mexican immigrant community in the United States.

For most of the women who participated in my research, the primary reason they yearn to obtain legal status isn’t necessarily to obtain employment (this can somehow be obtained anyway, they say) or to draw social benefits or to be able to vote, but rather to be able to travel back to Mexico. They yearn to connect with their roots and see the families they’ve not seen for a very long time. This is what is most valuable to them and what they’ve lost in seeking the American dream. As Chinita, who has not been able to see her parents, extended family, or community for over twenty years, said,

Me gustaría tener papeles para viajar. Quiero regresar de donde yo soy. Es algo que anhelas: regresar a tus raíces, ver a tu familia que hace mucho no has visto. Por buscar el sueño americano, avece pierdes algo tan valioso, que es la familia. . . . Es lo que mas anhelas—eso sería la razón numero uno de querer papeles; porque trabajas de una forma, pero la parte mas valiosa [es] volver.

I would like to have papers to travel. I want to go back to where I am from. This is something that one yearns: return to your roots, see your family that for a long time you have not seen. For seeking the American dream, sometimes one loses something so valuable, that is the family. . . . That is what one yearns the most—that would be the number-one reason to want papers because you work one way or another, but the most valuable part, is to return. (Chinita, personal interview, 2016).

Family separation is a high price to pay for seeking a dream that has not been made for us, people of color; on the contrary, such a dream might be true for only selected white privileged people who continue to benefit from accumulation of wealth and status generated from the ongoing privatization of stolen lands and labor from Indigenous and Black populations in the United States, Mexico, and around the world. Many in my community have lost what is more valuable to them—the ability to go back to their roots and family. White-supremacist laws, policies, and interventions contribute to the making of disadvantageous conditions at places of origin, forcing many to leave their home and land as they embark on a journey that has been made dangerous. But then such laws also criminalize and deny mobilities. Forced, criminalized, and denied mobilities are central to the workings of white-supremacist bordering and othering, which entrench anti-Blackness and de-Indianization logics enabling (and normalizing) extraction of resources, labor, land dispossession, and denial of life chances.

Nita explains that the only reason why she would like to have papers is to go see her family. She says, “La razón principal para tener papeles, es nada mas para ir a ver a mi familia” (The most important reason to have papers, is only to be able to go see my family). Nita has not been able to see her mother and siblings for over twenty years, and lately she’s been suffering from anxiety and depression. She mentioned that she deeply misses her family in El Rancho and that in the meantime her body is giving up due to a lack of sleep from getting up as early as two o’clock, often seven mornings a week, to work on the farm. During the warmer season—for over half of the year—Nita (as most farm workers) has to be at the job site at around four o’clock in the morning and works for over twelve hours, earning minimum wage.

Further, for Lola, her primary reason for wanting papers is to go back to her barrio in El Rancho and scream. Lola said that she would like to obtain papers

para poder ir pa México. Porque de que tengo ganas de ir, si, tengo ganas de ir. Pero me hago a la idea que no [puedo]. El hermano de Pedro que se vino hace dos años con su esposa, pagaron US$7,000 por cada uno [para cruzar la frontera]. Lo primero que haría si yo pudiera ir seria . . . echarme unos gritos ahí en el barrio. Aquí no grito porque aquí no voy a sentir igual de bonito. [Es que] Yo allá me echaba los gritos desde chiquita.

to be able to go to Mexico. Because that I want to go, yes, I want to go. But I realize that I can’t. The brother of Pedro who came two years ago with his wife, paid US$7,000 for each [to cross the frontier]. The first thing I would do if I could go would be . . . to scream there in the neighborhood. I don’t scream here because I’m not going to get the same beautiful feeling. [The reason is that] I used to scream there since I was little. (Lola, personal interview, 2016)

Here, Lola wasn’t just referring to simply screaming. This is what we call güaipear; it’s a specific kind of sound that can be interpreted as masculinist, but some women in my community in Mexico, including Lola, would often also güaipear since childhood. Not everyone can do this, as it requires certain skill. Güaipear often takes place in fiestas when ranchera music is playing, or in the case of El Rancho, it is also done in the cerros (mountains) or just in the open. It expresses happiness and produces a feeling of relief, freedom, empowerment, and belonging; but also the sound makes the space feel happy in general. It is a complicated but amazing feeling that is linked to place, community, people, sound, and belonging. This is why for Lola, as can be the case for others, güaipear in the United States wouldn’t generate the same amazing feeling. Lola would like to scream (to güaipear), but only in her barrio, located in El Rancho, the place she used to scream as kid—the place where her roots are— and so the only place where she would feel amazing to güaipear. However, in 2014, it cost U.S.$7,000 to cross the U.S.-Mexico deadly buffer zone. By 2021 the price had doubled. For Lola, who has not been able to return to her community for over fifteen years, as for all undocumented immigrants, the possibility of going in order to güaipear there, and to see family and reconnect with roots, continues to worsen as both cost and risks have exponentially increased. This example reflects how people in El Rancho connect/relate to place, sound, and each other. As Wilson (2008) indicates, we are our relations, and our relations are knowledges. This also reveals some losses produced by forced/denied mobilities and why the ability to return is so utterly crucial—only in El Rancho can the full structure of feeling, of specific relations, be experienced and passed from generation to generation.

This awareness and the yearning to share these feelings and relational ways of being and knowing with their children have led my immigrant community to support each other in order to reconnect the community across generations and colonizing borders. Their organizing and politics draw from ways of being and knowing that center relational communality, have been passed from generation to generation, and have been adapted and readapted in order to confront ongoing and new state-led racial violence in Mexico and in the United States.⁶ I conclude with an example that illustrates how resistance to racial capitalism is partly accomplished through communal politics of sharing that transform citizenship from individualized private property—as an expression of personhood per liberal normalized logics (Harris 1993; Roy 2017)—into a community and reterritorialized tool that enables connections of families across space, colonizing borders, and generations. Such connections reinforce intercommunity relations and trans-spatial belonging for new generations, contributing to the production of meaningful humane and social life—a kind of personhood that exceeds the limits of white propertied personhood within racial capitalism.

Relational Communality as Resistance

While in theory the majority of Mexicans, including my own community, have adopted the de-Indianized non-Black identity of mestizo, in practice Indigenous and Indigenous-descent (mestizo) communities continue to enact ways of being and knowing that challenge ongoing colonial and imperial racial-capitalist oppressions. Such resistance emerges from relational ways of being and knowing and draws from communality as a way of life. Zapotec Indigenous scholar Jaime Martínez Luna (2015) refers to communality as Indigenous forms of life that center the community. Communality means that everything is by and for the community, including the land, work, and fiestas (Martínez Luna 2015). Communality also informs how life is organized and experienced in rural mestizo communities. These ways of being and knowing, which require practices of respect, solidarity, and reciprocity, have been passed from generation to generation and have been adapted and readapted in order to confront ongoing and new forms of racial state violence both in Mexico and, in the case of migrants, also in the United States (Valencia 2019a).

Logics of communality—as a way of being in and knowing the world— enable the ongoing support and sharing of resources that tend to be framed and practiced as individual property by liberal logics in the United States. These resources include housing, food, money, time, and celebrations. While the specific examples vary, I share how my immigrant community has transformed U.S. citizenship (a private and protected “property” afforded those deemed “worthy” by white-supremacist law; Cacho 2012; Spade 2011) into a reterritorialized communal tool that enhances transborder and intergenerational community connection. Such practices are rooted in ways of being and knowing that draw from Indigenous values of respect, solidarity, and reciprocity that continue to be practiced in both Indigenous and de-Indigenized communities in Mexico. These ways of being and knowing are then brought to the United States as a form of border thinking (Mignolo 2000), adapted and readapted to confront legal structural discrimination and barriers enabled by (and sustained through) logics of racial capitalism.

In El Rancho, a mestiza (de-Indianized) community where I lived until 1995, connections to place and to each other are centered on the production of meaningful and dignified life. The majority of my participants and community in Washington migrated from this place. El Rancho is located in Michoacán, one of the poorest states in Mexico. We have a large and inclusive community and multiple relations in this little town of about eight hundred residents. We also have networks with other, smaller surrounding communities. Whenever there was a celebration, we were all invited. We could just go visit anyone anytime, and we were welcome to sit and eat. In fact, we cleaned our home thoroughly every day just in case someone would come to visit us. In the evenings we sat outside, by the sidewalk, and talked with whoever was passing by, who would often sit and join the conversation.

Apart from having a large network of close family members, my mother would always relate us to everyone, pulling connections from multiple generations back, making all adults my aunts and uncles and younger kids my cousins. I remember one day I told her, “Okay, I guess I’ll never be able to date anyone as everyone is my cousin!” That made my mom happy. Whenever we met someone new, my mom or family members would ask, “Where are you from? What is your last name? Are you from this or that family?” And then boom! They would find our connections, either through blood, or through having lived in the same place at one time, or through knowing the same families, or through compadrasgo. Finding our connections and putting people in context to place and multiple relations are ongoing Indigenous practices around the world (Wilson 2008).

Besides living in relation, people in El Rancho continue to enact communality through the land, work, and fiestas that are by and for the community (Martínez Luna 2015). Despite the Mexican government’s efforts to weaken the ejido (communal) system, the land in El Rancho continues to be communal; fiestas are organized by the people and for the people; and for community projects, everyone is expected to contribute work, food, or another type of support. In the context of local and transnational state-led racial capitalism, relational communality matters because it enables the ongoing production of meaningful and humane life. As Wilson (2008) states, our relations define who we are and what we know. The state does not have full power to give or take away personhood and humanity; our multiple relations across space and generations sustain them.

Such ways of relating continue to inform how life is organized in El Rancho and also inform communal logics of relating in the United States, where our mere presence is criminalized through white-supremacist laws, such as the immigration law. While immigrants in my U.S. community practice a version of relational communality, many recognize that ways of living like El Rancho cannot be fully replicated in the United States, as in the case of Lola, who cannot reproduce the same feeling and connections experienced through güaipear. These embodied ways of being, knowing, doing, and feeling are at risk of being lost in a society where these relations are ignored, devalued, and disrupted due to forced and denied mobilities. As such, many in my community yearn to send their kids to Mexico, to El Rancho, so they can experience and learn from other ways of living there. Also, families back in Mexico constantly express a desire to see them again and/or to meet their grandkids. My teenaged daughters (who recently were able to visit El Rancho for the first time) have told me it is not the same to learn about this way of life through stories from parents and/or family members in the United States. Rather, powerful learning and connections come from actually being there and experiencing how people treat each other as family, as relatives, even if they are not family by blood. The experiences of walking everywhere and being able to talk to everyone; being invited into people’s homes, kitchens, and celebrations at any time; and feeling at home, allowed them to feel welcomed, safe, and included. As Smith states, “To be connected is to be whole” (2013, 148). Such experiences of interconnection, belonging, and wholeness in turn can continue to influence how community relations are practiced by Mexican immigrants in the United States across generations. While I was able to finally take my own kids back to El Rancho, many in my community are legally denied this possibility.

In response to this yearning and drawing on logics of relational communality—where relations determine who we are, our personhood, and our humanity, and where sharing practices are centered—some Mexicans with U.S. citizenship in our immigrant community arrange to bring U.S.-born children of undocumented community members back to El Rancho. As such, some community members use the privilege and right of mobility granted through citizenship to become bridges and interconnectors of the community across legal physical barriers and across generations.⁷ Rather than keeping these privileges to themselves as individualistic private property as per liberal understandings of citizenship, they instead build a way of life that centers relationality and solidarity. They convert their privileges into community tools that then strengthen relations of solidarity and trust between undocumented parents, Mexican U.S. citizens, and the community in El Rancho. Once there, grandparents and/or family introduce the U.S.-born children to everyone in the community. The children are placed in relation as members of specific families, who already relate to everyone. This way, the children are able to ontologically connect with the community in Mexico at the same time as they experience other ways of being, knowing, relating—and thus humanity.

This is a powerful way in which relational communality enables the making of U.S. citizenship into a community tool to enhance community relations, and thus humanity, across colonizing borders. My community demonstrates that sharing privileges granted from privatized framings of citizenship strengthens community relations between undocumented parents and the Mexican U.S. citizens who use their privilege to move across the physical buffer zone known as the U.S.-Mexico border and to act as a bridge in solidarity across space and generations. This is an expression of humanity and full personhood and radical politics of disruption and refusal that emerge from logics of relational communality as ways of being and knowing. This relational communality illustrates relational reworkings of liberal formations, refuses liberal projects of citizenship and exclusion, connects with ongoing (and opens up new) terrains and practices of struggle in Mexico and across Abya Yala—the Indigenous name for the entire continent we inhabit (Valle Escalante 2014).

T/here, for over five hundred years, Indigenous communities have resisted not only de-Indianization as an identity but also, most importantly, detrimental material consequences that emerge from a de-Indianized (liberal) way of life that centers capitalism, which requires constant displacement. A few of many powerful examples of Indigenous resistance include the Mexican Revolution of 1910 led by Indigenous communities in defense of communal (non-privatization) ownership of lands, the Zapatistas (Indigenous groups from Chiapas) in opposition to neoliberal economic policies of extraction and war since the early 1990s (Khasnabish 2013), and Indigenous and de-Indianized (mestiza) communities who practice relational communality in their everyday. Examples include preserving land as communally held ejidos in contrast to capitalist privatization (Martínez Luna 2015; Valencia 2019a; Villalba 2013) and Berta Cáceres’s (an Indigenous Lenca woman) opposition to neoliberal projects that violate the rights of rivers to flow freely. For her, as for many Indigenous communities, rivers are sacred and alive, holding memories, spirits, and deep interconnections with all kinds of life that are denied in liberal, racial-capitalist ontologies. These struggles resist de-Indianization, fight for relational communal ways of life, and resist ongoing colonialism informed by liberal poverty knowledge and liberal logics of humanity. I join these calls for a world where all forms of life and ways of being and knowing are respected and where radical relations of care among humans and nonhuman life, lands, and waters are restored.

NOTES

1. Indigenous peoples from Latin American continue to face land dispossession, displacement, racism, and criminalization (Menchaca 2001; Saldaña-Portillo 2017; Ybarra 2017), but mestizaje matters because it facilitates our de-Indianization, internalized racism, and distancing from our roots and land, which in combination with (im)mobilities enable expansion of settler-colonial imperialism.

2. The Bracero Program, a wartime emergency initiative, was implemented in 1942 to ease a shortage of agricultural labor in the United States. This program proved a dream for U.S. growers as it provided an uninterrupted, cheap, and captive labor supply. Braceros were expected to work exclusively for the specific grower-contractor regardless of working conditions and to return soon after the season ended, and they were prohibited from organizing (Calavita 1992).

3. Today workers move across the border through seasonal labor programs such as the h-2a and h-2b visas, meant to recruit seasonal workers, mostly from Mexico, to fulfil the demands for cheap labor by the agriculture and food industry.

4. According to Ruth W. Gilmore, racial capitalism didn’t originate with Black slaves; poor whites had been converted into cheap labor before then (Card 2020).

5. Racial logics are imposed across the Americas.

6. As Valencia (2019a) demonstrates, there have been multiple practices rooted in Indigenous relational communality across time and space, but here I focus on how such practices—which enable community relations across space and generations—challenge liberal, individualistic propertied personhood and humanity.

7. To clarify, this is often the case for people who have family and a large community back in El Rancho. However, for those who were most deeply affected by the wave of violence, due in large part to the war on drugs waged and encouraged by the United States, it has not been easy to send their kids back to El Rancho. Even for those who have documents, returning or bringing their kids can be unsafe.

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