Colonization,migration,and right-wing extremism: The constitution of embodied life of a dispossessed undocumented immigrant woman

Abstract

The aim of this essay is to illuminate the lived experiences of Victoria—an undocumented immigrant woman of Mexican origin working and living in the United States. Drawing on an in-depth interview conducted with Victoria following the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States, we identify a set of discursive and material conditions that inform her lived reality. By examining three mutually constituting stages of Victoria’s life, we invite readers to consider how the imbricated nexus between global manifestations of colonization, migration, and the political rise of right-wing extremism is embodied and negotiated locally by one particular woman. To aid in theoretically informing the excerpts provided by Victoria, we draw on Judith Butler’s recent works in which she develops, individually and collaboratively, ideas of dispossession and precariousness. We find that dispossession and precariousness foreground the currents of vulnerability that are located palpably in Victoria’s narrative. Finally, by engaging with a genre of feminine writing that collapses the traditional boundaries between theory and practice, we revisit the question of praxis in relation to the researchers’ responsibility toward the participants of their study.

We are here because you were (are) there.

Sunera Thobani

Setting the stage

Heeding calls from scholars in organization and management studies to subvert conventional modes of academic writing (Phillips et al., 2014; Prasad, 2016; Pullen and Rhodes, 2008; Rhodes, 2019; Vachhani, 2019) and inspired by recent works in the social sciences that critique myriad global discourses using the narrative of a single socially disenfranchised woman (Enriquez, 2017; Millar, 2014), the aim of this essay is to illuminate the lived experience of Victoria—an undocumented immigrant woman of Mexican origin working and living in the United States. Drawing on an in-depth interview conducted with Victoria shortly after the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States, we identify a set of discursive and material conditions that pivotally inform the subject’s lived reality. By examining three mutually constituting stages of Victoria’s life, we invite readers to consider how the imbricated nexus between global manifestations of colonization, migration, and the political rise of right-wing extremism is embodied and negotiated locally by one particular woman. We contend that Victoria’s narrative has wide relevance for understanding the (gendered) undocumented immigrant predicament. Namely, while the specific experiences recalled by Victoria may be idiosyncratic to her situation, the overarching patterns of vulnerability and exploitation that traverse her narrative are illustrative of what undocumented immigrants routinely encounter.

Victoria’s narrative shares an intimate nexus with multiple concepts raised in the works of social theorist, Judith Butler. As such, to aid in theoretically informing the excerpts provided by Victoria, we draw on Butler’s recent works in which she develops, individually and collaboratively, ideas of dispossession and precariousness. We find that dispossession and precariousness foreground the currents of vulnerability that are located palpably in Victoria’s narrative. Likewise, these two concepts are useful in linking macro-level social phenomena with how such phenomena are embodied at the local level, which is ostensibly the political intent of this essay. Finally, by engaging with a genre of feminine writing that collapses the traditional boundaries between theory and practice, we revisit the question of praxis in relation to researchers’ responsibility toward the participants of their study.

The remainder of this essay is presented in four sections. The first three sections commence with a narrative account of a pivotal stage of Victoria’s life: (1) life in childhood, (2) life as an undocumented immigrant laborer, and, (3) life after Trump’s election. In each section, Victoria’s narrative is followed by ‘scholarly’ analysis of some of the key issues raised in her account. We purposefully keep our integrative discussion between Victoria’s narrative and scholarly analysis limited in an effort to capture our concern over the bifurcation between writing (about) embodied experience, on one hand, and the parameters of what traditionally qualifies as scholarship, on the other (Madan, 2018; Prasad, 2019). In doing so, we encourage for more dialogical interaction between the detached and the sanitized form of academic writing and the unmitigated rawness of a situated life. Finally, the last section closes the essay by considering the role of researchers as agents for political change relating to the negation of those discourses and public policies that detrimentally affect the participants of their study.

Life in childhood

I have been in the US for about 18 years. I came here because my husband and I didn’t have jobs in Mexico … In Mexico, I always lived in poverty. Sometimes we didn’t even have anything to eat. My dad worked but with 7 kids, and living where we lived [we often went hungry]. I’d listen to my mom and dad saying, ‘What are we going to eat tomorrow?’ or ‘What am I going to give to the kids?’ I was always listening to those words.

I knew that when they got sick, they had to endure the pain at home because they didn’t have money to pay a doctor. I remember that so well and I thought, ‘the day I go there [to the United States], I will work and the money that I make will be for my parents’.

I have a brother who also got married and who also lived in poverty. He built a house with cardboard and whatever else he could find. I can’t forget how during the rainy season it was all gone. Him and my sister-in-law had two little kids. She put them in the small car they had and they stayed there with the strong wind and the horrible rain. When we went back there, the house was gone. I brought all of those memories with me.

People from Latin American countries have long encountered devastating social, political, and economic conditions, which have compelled them to leave their homelands in the hope of finding a better life elsewhere for themselves and their families. Detrimental to their sense of security, these conditions frequently involve, among other tangible challenges, ‘poverty, violence, crime and corruption’ (Becerra et al., 2012: 112). Such challenges inform the material realities of vulnerable subjects and engender, what Butler and Athanasiou (2013) have labeled, dispossession. For them, dispossession constitutes ‘the processes and ideologies by which persons are disowned and abjected by normative and normalizing powers that define cultural intelligibility and that regulate the distribution of vulnerability’ (Butler and Athanasiou, 2013: 2). Ultimately, dispossession captures an injurious practice by which bodies are materialized and de-materialized in ways that ‘determine the terms of [those bodies’] subjectivity, survival, and livability’ (Butler and Athanasiou, 2013: 2).

Butler and Athanasiou (2013) note that dispossession is both a precursor to, and a symptom of, myriad global phenomena such as capitalist alienation and immigration. Extending from this observation, critical management scholars have taken great efforts to demonstrate, specifically, the intimate nexus between capitalist accumulation and violent articulations of dispossession in the Global South (e.g. Alamgir and Cairns, 2015; Banerjee, 2008; Varman and Al-Amoudi, 2016). This nexus is highly relevant to the geopolitical context of Latin America as, since the time of the Conquest, dispossession has persevered in the maintenance of a (neoliberal) capitalist system that has led to the region’s systematic underdevelopment while, concomitantly, offering benefits to the economic interests of the imperialistic Global North (Frank, 1970). ¹

One logical, though still disturbing, outcome of dispossession is the transnational migration of millions of Latin American residents to the United States (and elsewhere). This is precisely what is being captured by Sunera Thobani in her quote that introduces this essay. Indeed, when certain patterns of human movements across the globe are understood as being the corollary of dispossession, they offer a troubling explanation for transnational migration. Within this purview, the outflow of subjects from the Global South to the Global North can be read as offering empirical substantiation to Marx’s claim that ‘men make their own history, but not their own free will; not under circumstances they themselves have chosen’ (as cited in Gomberg-Muñoz, 2010: 298). Interpreted through this lens, under circumstances constitutive of dispossession, transnational migration is more the outcome of structural coercion than of free will.

Interestingly, in their theorization of dispossession, Butler and Athanasiou (2013) explicate the precise relationship between the concept and transnational migration. As they remark,

In the context of neoliberal forms of capital—combined with tightened migration policies and the abjection of stateless people, sans papiers, ‘illegal’ immigrants—bodies (that is, human capital) are becoming increasingly disposable, dispossessed by capital and its exploitive excess, uncountable and unaccounted for. (Butler and Athanasiou, 2013: 28, emphasis in original)

Taking stock of the precarious social, political, and economic conditions that motivate the dispossessed subject to migrate to foreign lands in search of better opportunities is paramount if a holistic understanding of these subjects’ lived realities is to be gleaned.

In terms of labor, undocumented immigrants form, what has been termed, the new ‘precariat’—they commonly occupy the bottom tiers of the labor market and encounter ‘paradigmatic precarious [work conditions]’ (Waite et al., 2014: 316). Indeed, undocumented immigrants habitually have their work prospects limited to the most physically demanding and poorly compensated jobs, such as cleaning, selling, caring, and serving; for this reason, some scholars have concluded that the work conditions for these individuals are ‘usually paved with steep costs’ (Ramirez and Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2009: 85). The situation is even more deleterious when accounting for gender. Namely, for undocumented immigrant women, they must not only be concerned about finding and maintaining a job, but they are also all too often responsible for performing as the primary or sole caretakers of their families—especially of their parents and children. Victoria described vividly her initial experiences with work upon arriving in the United States and further alluded to the underlying reason for why she accepted the deplorable conditions under which she worked:

When I got here, I worked from 7 am to 7 pm. My bones ached. I had a fever. That went on for over a week because I wasn’t used to working or getting up that early. I went to work in pain, with a fever but every check I got, I sent to my parents. [I told them] ‘pay what you owe, save some money, have fun!’ I always wanted them to go out and have fun.

Victoria explained that after 18 years, she still sends money to her parents in Mexico. She also revealed that even though she has had to do many labor-intensive jobs—during some of which she encountered various forms of abuse—she did so for her family. In reflecting on her move to the United States, she noted that the most difficult part emotionally has been the inability to see her parents. While underscoring this point, she acknowledged that her hard work has allowed for money to be sent back to Mexico, which has done good things for her family: ‘My dream always was to help my parents. My dream always was to help my siblings. That was my goal. I think I have achieved something’.

Undocumented immigrants who have been compelled to leave their homeland at a young age must not only grapple with a sense of not belonging in their destination country (Prasad, 2014), but they encounter numerous material challenges (see Chavez, 2013). A political system steeped in insecurity functions against undocumented immigrants by often depriving them of the most basic elements of life, including sufficient access to food and health care (Kullgren, 2003). As has been illustrated through powerful ethnographic accounts, this system of insecurity permeates the psyche of children who live in a constant state of vulnerability—burdened with a compelling sense of responsibility to help improve not only their own lives but also those of their parents (Estrada and Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2011).

Understanding the precarious economic position of their parents, children ‘feel an obligation towards their families, gratitude for their parents’ support, and a shared belief that they should reciprocate’ (Estrada and Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2011: 23). Essentially, from a very young age, the children of undocumented immigrants become, what some scholars have labeled, ‘production agents’ (De Janvry and Garramón, 1977: 214)—they hold a strong sense of economic duty toward their family. The sense of responsibility toward the family explains, at least in part, the motivation of some dispossessed subjects to become undocumented laborers in the first place. Put simply, such a move furnishes them with the opportunity to work in the United States and to earn American dollars. The dollars are, then, sent back ‘home’ to support their families—a practice known as remittance. Many communities in Latin America remain dependent on remittances for survival and regional development (Airola, 2007; Durand et al., 1996). In sum, for undocumented immigrants, working in the United States proffers the means by which to meet the basic needs of their families who remain in the homeland (de la Garza and Lowell, 2002). Victoria’s dream was to be able to provide a better quality of life to members of her immediate family by working in the United States and sending remittances back home. The fruition of this dream has come with substantial sacrifices—including, above all, the inability to see them again.

While Victoria’s underlying aim to economically support her family in Mexico was fulfilled by moving to the United States, the fulfillment of this aim should not paint too rosy of a picture. She described how she is replete with concern and guilt for leaving her family in Mexico, in a city that has become increasingly dangerous over the years. As Victoria commented,

In my town now, a lot of violence has emerged, because in that place there are a lot of drug dealers … Can you imagine? I am here and to think that your parents are there, your siblings, it has been horrible.

Victoria’s story encompasses a form of dispossession that stems from being raised in extreme poverty from a very young age. Growing up impoverished and witnessing the daily struggles of her parents would ultimately lead her to leave Mexico and ‘illegally’ migrate to the United States—a decision that was predicated more on need than on any concerted form of desire. While not being aware of what might await her on the other side of the border, Victoria had a clear objective in mind: to offer a better life for her family whom she left behind in her journey into the abyss of becoming an undocumented immigrant.

Life as an undocumented immigrant laborer

While I was working at a factory, I was always afraid. That was a job where they said that immigration officers might come and I was afraid that they would actually come. Yes, I was always afraid … I have never liked being watched while I’m working [as a cleaner]. Every time I went into a building, I felt afraid. I didn’t know what kind of people lived there.

A man gave us [Victoria and her brother] a cleaning job. He told us where we had to work and paid us for the first week. The second week he didn’t pay us. Nor did he pay us for the third week. When we went to get our money he was gone. It was unfair. We felt that it was so unfair, so humiliating to go so far carrying all the things we needed to work from early in the morning so that we could clean everything. And it was all for what? The exhaustion, the bad smells we endured at the houses, so dirty—and for what? To not receive any compensation? From then onwards, I never wanted to go back as a house cleaner. I felt despair, I felt disillusioned. And even more so for my brother. My brother hadn’t had a job for a long time and with the money he earned he was going to pay his rent and buy diapers for his newborn baby girl. I felt really bad to see my brother cry that day.

As described in the previous section, the most ubiquitous reason motivating undocumented immigrants to migrate is to escape the destitute conditions of their home country and to find better work-related opportunities elsewhere (De Genova, 2002; Vallejo, 2015). However, once they arrive in their destination country, they do not seamlessly dislocate themselves from the destitution that took them the foreign land in the first place. Indeed, undocumented immigrants encounter myriad forms of precariousness. Butler (2012: 147) has argued that to understand precariousness, we need to identify ‘bodily dependence and need, hunger and the need for shelter, the vulnerability to injury and destruction, forms of social trust that let us live and thrive, and the passions linked to our persistence as clearly political issues’. She further explains that ‘everyone is precarious’ (Butler, 2012: 148) inasmuch as their existence depends upon others as they navigate the hegemonic institutions that structure society. While acknowledging that everyone is precarious, Butler (2006) nuances her thinking about the concept by noting that differences along the lines of various social axes—including race, gender, class, and legal status—inform the substance and the degree of precariousness experienced by subjects (Fotaki and Prasad, 2015).

In some of its most extreme forms, precariousness can be analytically understood only by accounting for its underlying enabling mechanism of dehumanization. Martí and Fernández (2013: 1213) explain that ‘dehumanizing processes affect the capacity of human beings to act, think and feel’. Dehumanizing undocumented immigrants through labels such as ‘illegal, criminal and fugitive’ (Golash-Boza and Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2013: 281) rationalizes their status as dangerous criminals whose racialized bodies must be stringently governed and who are deemed to be not worthy of basic human rights. Discourse that dehumanizes such subjects ‘provide a rhetorical space in which the Mexican [and, more broadly, the Latina/o] body became a criminal body [that] threatens the safety of Americans’ (Flores, 2003: 376). Ultimately, dehumanization allows for the operation of precariousness insofar as it obfuscates recognition of not only others’ humanity but also their vulnerabilities. Dehumanization has been experienced by Victoria since she initially arrived into the United States—an exemplar incident is described in the excerpt above about her and her brother not being compensated for the work that they were transacted to complete.

Conceptualizing the nexus between dehumanization and precariousness is certainly germane in the case of undocumented immigrants who confront exploitation through the ideological negation of their humanity. Dehumanization attenuates subjectivity, which leaves such individuals vulnerable to exploitation and violence. Likewise, it paradoxically renders them invisible in the very social and political discourses that center upon their bodies. ²

The aspect of life where undocumented immigrants are perhaps most susceptible to dehumanization is work. Owing to not holding citizenship or legal residency status, these individuals have a rather complicated—almost problematic—relationship with work. Undocumented immigrants often exhibit an unwavering work ethic exhibited by their willingness to not only do undesirable, labor-intensive jobs but to also do such jobs for extraordinarily long hours. Victoria captured the latter point when she, with emotional tremor in her voice, described her husband: ‘It’s all work. My husband leaves home at 6:30 am every day. He finishes his first job at 4:30 pm. After that, he goes to his second job and doesn’t return home until midnight’.

Yet, while they are willing to undertake all sorts of work and for lengthy periods of time, for undocumented immigrants, precariousness materializes through the omnipresent risk of being deported. Fussell (2011: 593) has labeled this phenomenon, ‘the deportation threat dynamic’. The deportation threat dynamic functions as a discursive mechanism by which to control undocumented and racialized immigrant bodies (Anderson, 2010); that is, it allows, and indeed encourages, their exploitation by unscrupulous employers who are willing to take advantage of them for their own financial benefit. Undocumented immigrants are particularly vulnerable to exploitation and violence since employers know that such subjects fear being reported to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) (Fussell, 2011)—the agency of the federal government charged with the responsibility for enforcing immigration laws.

In short, given the deportation threat dynamic, undocumented immigrants routinely encounter job-related precariousness, ‘involv(ing) instability, lack of protection, insecurity and social or economic vulnerability’ (Rodgers, 1989: 5). Unfortunately, though not surprisingly, it is labor that is imbued with the salient potential for injurious physical risk that undocumented immigrants routinely undertake. Such work is often service-orientated, minimally compensated, and performed within an unsafe environment—or, stated more tersely, jobs that bona fide citizens refuse to do (Anderson, 2010). Almost tautologically, in doing such work, these legally disenfranchised individuals further internalize their relegated social position within society (Zulfiqar, 2019).

A common form of exploitation encountered by undocumented immigrants is wage theft—a practice wherein the employer refuses to compensate the employee for the work that the latter has done. This is a disturbingly common occurrence experienced by undocumented immigrants. As one observer notes, wage theft is one of the most deplorable examples of exploitation of this group as ‘it negates their reason for migrating in the first place’ (Fussell, 2011: 597). Experienced at a disproportionately higher rate by undocumented immigrants who are women (Milkman et al., 2010), it makes individuals feel helpless and humiliated as they lack any recourse to demand the compensation that is legitimately owed to them (Negi, 2011). As Victoria stated, ‘If we go somewhere [to file a complaint for not getting paid], the employer denies it. The police will believe them and we’ll be thrown in jail’. This point is further underscored in one of the anecdotes that Victoria shared about a different job that she completed with her brother:

My brother and I painted houses and when we were about to finish they kicked us out so not to pay us … When we said we were back to finish the job they would ask: ‘Who are you? If you don’t leave we will call the police!’ What did they mean that they didn’t know us? We were there the day before.

Again, far from being an isolated occurrence, wage theft is experienced by undocumented immigrants regularly. Describing a subsequent experience, Victoria recalled,

There was another home where I went to help my brother. I told him ‘let’s hope that the same thing doesn’t happen again’. My brother said, ‘no, this lady seems nice’. She did treat us well, she gave us water, but in the end she didn’t pay us and just asked us to leave.

With little or no recourse available in cases when employers elect not to fulfill their part of the work contract, undocumented immigrants are left feeling violated. Employers erroneously view ‘reluctant acquiescence’ from undocumented immigrants when the terms of their work contract are contravened as the latter’s tacit acceptance of the contractual breach (Fernando and Prasad, 2019). As suggested by Victoria, these employers are well aware of the fact that should undocumented immigrants make a fuss about non-compliance of the work contract they are putting their own residency in the United States in jeopardy. Paradoxically, it is this very reluctant acquiescence that positions undocumented immigrants in the role of ‘the good workers’ (MacKenzie and Forde, 2009: 149). Indeed, it is they who are willing to do whatever is asked of them without objection. The idea of undocumented immigrants as good workers corresponds to higher levels of exploitation; this is, again, reflected in their ‘perceived willingness to work hard … and, crucially, work long hours as and when the [employer] require[s]’ (MacKenzie and Forde, 2009: 150) and their willingness to work in hazardous environments (Walter et al., 2004).

Victoria’s narrative about her work experiences in the United States offers glimpses into the ways in which not possessing legal residency status engenders forms of embodied precariousness that, ultimately, becomes the precursors to her exploitation in the labor market. It also shows how the deportation threat dynamic ‘locks [her] in an endless cycle of work’ (Ahmad, 2008: 314) while, concomitantly, delimiting her job choices and opportunities. In short, Victoria’s narrative illustrates the precariousness that undocumented immigrants are subjected to on a daily basis and how not having options for recourse creates despair, frustration, and disillusionment among those who have left everything behind for, to return to Butler’s vernacular, more ‘livable’ opportunities elsewhere.

Life after Trump’s election

Now with President Trump, I am stressed. I feel anxious. I feel really nervous. There are days when I am really nervous. I think, I imagine … a lot of things come into my head and it is unbearable.

I don’t want to go out. Even yesterday I didn’t go out at all. I finished the housework and I didn’t want to go out, not even to buy tortillas at Vallarta [grocery store], which is so close. I didn’t want to go out at all. Whenever I heard people going upstairs I would quickly have a look to see who it was. I was anxious [and] on edge … I still feel like that. I am taking pills to feel calmer since we first heard about the raids.

I have talked about the situation with my boy but [when I do] he starts crying. I told him: ‘You will be staying with someone if I get caught because this is happening. And if I get caught they are going to send me to jail’. He replies: ‘But what am I going to do on my own?’ Then he starts crying so I try to avoid it and I say, ‘no, it’s ok, nothing is going to happen, we are ok’. I didn’t want to say anything else … As a mom I feel terrible to even think about it, having to talk about it, I don’t know how to approach it, [I don’t know] how to explain to my son that I might have to leave him. Just to think about it I feel terrible … I can’t find the exact words to express how I feel.

Nowadays, you don’t feel completely safe going out. You have to look everywhere. Even now when I left the house I saw someone who was talking—a man was speaking in English with someone and I thought I better go back into the house. I went back because I thought maybe he was talking to someone. And he [my son] is also scared, every time he hears someone knocking the door, he runs into the bedroom.

Now with what’s happening with the president … he allowed all the people who were already racist to come out. He made these hidden people come out and feel empowered to reject us, disrespect us, yell at us, offend us. He encouraged this. This had never happened before. There would be some hidden [discrimination] but since this President took office, since his proposals and everything, he made all these people come out. He made all this happen … We have never asked anything from the government. For us, everything has had a cost. It has all been based on sacrifice, effort, humiliation.

In his speech announcing his candidacy for president of the United States in June 2015, Donald Trump declared,

When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you … They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. (The Washington Post Staff, 2015)

This speech, along with the polemical discourse that followed, ushered in a new era of anti-immigrant rhetoric. This discourse can be related to Butler’s earlier ideas about the politics of recognition. As Butler (1990, 1997) explains, recognition is what makes possible social existence by affording subjects cultural intelligibility. Indeed, it is recognition that ‘forms a crucial part of the juridical and social formation of the subject’ (Butler, 1997: 381, emphasis in original). However, Butler is careful to underscore that not all types of recognition are constructed equal. Culturally disenfranchised subjects often have ideologically circumscribed forms of recognition imposed upon them by culturally powerful actors. Butler explicates that this type of recognition is formulated with the explicit intent to levy control and punishment upon disenfranchised subjects. In applying these insights to the case of undocumented immigrants, Trump’s words essentially recognize the subjectivity of these constituents, though only to the extent to which it allows for the governance of their existence in the most reprehensive of ways.

Not surprisingly, the election of Trump has had demonstrably horrid effects on the lived reality of undocumented immigrants residing in the United States. More than ever, legal status (or the lack thereof) is being unscrupulously utilized by the state—and by employers—as the basis for controlling (racialized) undocumented immigrant bodies (see De Genova, 2016). These bodies have become abject according to Butler: ‘Those lives [that] don’t get figured as lives … the unthinkable, the unlivable, the unintelligible [that] has no discursive life’ (Butler as cited in Meijer and Prins, 1998: 281). ³

The criminalization of undocumented immigrants is not new within the American legal and social milieu (Becerra et al., 2012). The phenomenon is predicated on the unfounded idea that the removal of such people will make America safer (Golash-Boza and Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2013). This position is made tenable by the belief that ‘immigration controls are not simply about conditions of entry across the border, but about conditions of stay’ (Anderson, 2010: 309).

Trump’s vitriol claims about the presence of undocumented—or, to borrow his vernacular, ‘illegal’—immigrants as a threat to American society’s safety and stability have spawned and legitimated right-wing extremist groups (Becerra et al., 2012). The recent incidents of White nationalist rallies occurring across the country bear testimony of this fact (Galofaro, 2017). Boyle asserts, consistent with Victoria’s account, that the demonization of undocumented immigrants coming from the highest echelon of government has tacitly ‘[given] them permission to come out into the real world’ (as cited in Galofaro, 2017). The legal pardoning of Joe Arpaio by Trump only crystallizes the message to undocumented immigrants that, under the current regime, racism and violence against them will be condoned (Tharoor, 2017). ⁴

On another front, Trump’s divisive proclamations against undocumented immigrants have made their bodies visible in political discourse. Politically speaking, such a move has provisioned for their bodies to be available for public scrutiny and state interrogation. This outcome is evident when seen through the lens of the panopticon, which suggests that ‘visibility is a trap … [in which] a state of conscious and permanent visibility assures the automatic functioning of power’ (Foucault, 1995: 200). The panopticon offers a mechanism of autonomous surveillance by those who are its operators (Townley, 1993). Its scope regulates those performing within organizations (Prasad, 2013), and within society more broadly, by establishing various techniques of the self through which subjects are required to govern themselves (Brewis, 2004).

The panopticon becomes internalized by undocumented immigrants who must monitor not only their behavior but also their very presence as the threatening and the intrusive gaze of the state—represented by ICE—can be cast upon them at any time. This threat is further actualized by the fact that undocumented immigrants are all too aware of the magnitude of the consequences posed to themselves and to their families if they are to be caught and deported. Given that undocumented immigrants do not possess legal status, the discursive effects of the panopticon are felt ever the more conspicuously. Indeed, they are hyper-vigilant about where they are and who is around them as any misstep could potentially lead to their arrest, prosecution, and deportation.

The discursive corollary of the panopticon has myriad detrimental effects on the day-to-day lives of undocumented immigrants. One poignant example is how it relates to families, particularly, those involving young children. With their bodies visible to the gaze of the state, undocumented immigrant parents must take the proactive measures necessary to provision for the welfare of their (American-born) children if they were to be arrested and deported. Such scenarios create enduring emotional trauma on both parents and children (Golash-Boza and Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2013). On this point, Victoria recalled a recent experience she had with an ‘American’ woman in the parking lot of a local restaurant:

The woman told me to go back to my country, she insulted me, she yelled at me in front of everyone and nobody did anything about it … She yelled at me in front of my son. I took him and kept walking. She drove towards me, then I jumped back and she followed me, I said ‘you’re going to run my kid over’ and she said ‘I don’t care’.

In sum, the ideological discourse propagated in the political arena has served to only aggrandize the precariousness—as described by Butler—normally experienced by undocumented immigrants in the United States. This substantiates Henry Giroux’s (2016) recent observation that ‘dangerous ideas [mobilize] real life violence’ (p. 98). The confluence of dangerous ideas and real life violence has exacerbated undocumented immigrants’ vulnerability and fear while, at the same time, providing employers with a steady supply of labor that is cheap, expendable, and acquiescent to abuse. Undocumented immigrants have to suffer such a predicament while continuing to navigate the cultural quagmire of ‘pervasive stereotypes and profound stigmatization’ (Gomberg-Muñoz, 2010: 301).

Victoria’s account of her life after Trump’s election and the effect that it has had on her and her son clearly shows how precariousness has been amplified with the political rise of right-wing extremism. Likewise, it illuminates some of the ways by which dispossession and precariousness become conflated; reifying the vulnerability and the exploitation encountered by undocumented immigrants. At this juncture, a type of paranoia has developed within the psyche of Victoria that makes even the most mundane of tasks, such as, leaving the home to shop for groceries, replete with anxiety. Sadly, rather than improving the lives of undocumented immigrants, things appear to only be deteriorating. The nightmare for Victoria—and many others in similar positions—continues.

Epilogue

The interview upon which this essay is based comes from a 9-month-long ethnographic study that focused on the work and the life experiences of undocumented immigrants of Latina/o decent living in Southern California. The conclusion of the data collection for the ethnographic study was marked by the researcher’s participation in the International Worker’s Day (more popularly known as ‘May Day’) protest on 1 May 2017 in Los Angeles—which, in retrospect, seems apropos. While this protest occurs annually, on this day, in 2017, it was especially significant as the protest was used to offer a visual display of resistance against the ongoing post-Trump raids of undocumented immigrants that was/is occurring across the United States.

At this protest, the researcher marched alongside thousands of undocumented immigrants in a demonstration of solidarity and social activism. ⁵ During this protest, the researcher led inspired chants of, ‘No Papers, No Fear!’ She held a sign that read, ‘Stop Separating Families’. She stood alongside, shoulder-to-shoulder with others whose signs proclaimed slogans like, ‘Fuck Weed, Legalize My Mom’ and ‘No Human Being is Illegal’. And, in the crowd, was Victoria. She was present, standing proud in a powerful display of human resiliency. Even after all that she had endured throughout her life, she was there with countless others who had not yet given up on—what appears to be—the ever fleeting American dream of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The researcher’s participation at the protest suggests a reimagining of praxis. It illuminates how, when confronting instances of dehumanizing injustice against the participants who are the empirical corpus of the study, the researcher can (and, as importantly, should!) become discursively invested in seeking tangible forms of redress. Efforts to seek redress in this case manifested in, among other things, being active at the protest; the researcher offered resistance against those discourses and public policies that detrimentally affect the participants from whom the researcher benefited. In taking such an action, the researcher became an (admittedly modest) agent for political change. Rather than being detached from the conditions under which her participants live, the researcher showed solidarity with them—an especially important responsibility when studying phenomena that have material consequences on disenfranchised subjects. Such a move functions as a corporeal act, embodying bell hooks (1994) powerful words: ‘When our lived experience of theorizing is fundamentally linked to the processes of self-recovery, of collective liberation, no gap exists between theory and practice’ (p. 61).