Fools Banished from the Kingdom: Remapping Geographies of Gang Violence between the Americas (Los Angeles and San Salvador)

Abstract

This essay explores how the policing, incarceration, and deportation of Salvadoran immigrant youth are reshaping the parameters of urban experience between Los Angeles and San Salvador. It argues that these disciplinary governmental practices have transformed the geographies of belonging, exclusion, and citizenship between the once putatively separate cultural and political spheres of the United States and Central America. These efforts to reassert national sovereignty through zero-tolerance policing strategies as they combine with the growing intersection between criminal and immigration law, only, and most ironically, induce and reproduce transnational flows. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with deported youth and young adults, the essay focuses on the crucial place of the city and of the local police beat in the production of their emergent transnational subjectivities. The experiences of these immigrant youth indicate that the complex flows and the multiple geopolitical scales of analysis at work in Los Angeles's urban barrios now make it impossible to engage with the cultural politics of one side of this social field without simultaneously accounting for those at play on the other side in San Salvador. These politics of simultaneity demonstrate the analytical power that both transnational and urban studies stand to gain from a mutual engagement with each other, and call for transnational urban studies as a new domain for research.

Latino immigrant men and the deportation crisis: A gendered racial removal program

“…Although no explicitly gendered legislation codifies this new turn, changes in administrative policies and practices have created a situation where the vast majority of deportees are working class men from Latin America and the Caribbean. We contend that the institutionalized criminalization and surveillance of men of color in urban streets (Young, 1999;Zilberg, 2004;Wacquant, 2009;Ramirez and Flores, 2011;Rios, 2011) -heightened in the post-9/11 climate of Islamaphobia and male joblessness exacerbated by global financial crisis and economic restructuring -have created the context for this shift. This became evident in both practice and discourse, as police surveillance, detention and deportation targeted Latin American immigrant men (Dowling and Inda, 2012).…”

“…We conclude by offering some questions, analyses and implications for both research and action. Many scholars working from diverse disciplines have analyzed the soaring number of deportations (Coutin, 2000;Hing, 2003;Ngai, 2004;Hernandez, 2008;Brotherton and Barrios, 2011; Golash-Boza, 2012;Kanstroom, 2012;King et al, 2012;Kretsedemas, 2012), and the increase in police/Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) cooperation (Zilberg, 2004;Stumpf, 2006;Donato and Armenta, 2011;Armenta, 2012;Coleman, 2012), yet these studies have not explicitly considered the intersectionality of gender, class and race in these removals. In this article, we review how US deportations ballooned between 1997 and 2012, and we underscore how these deportations disproportionately targeted Latino working class men.…”

Imagining a future in ‘bush’: migration aspirations at times of crisis in Anglophone Cameroon

“…former home countries) have found, in very different contexts, that deportees tend to struggle to successfully integrate and adjust to the place they Downloaded by [Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam] at 07:29 01 October 2013 have been deported to, and that most intend to return to the place they had formerly lived (Zilberg 2004, Peutz 2006, Coutin 2007, Brotherton 2008, Hagan et al 2008, Galvin 2012). …”

On silences: Salvadoran refugees then and now

“…During this period, in the US, Salvadoran youth who had settled into poor neighborhoods were met with other forms of violence and exclusion (Coutin 2013;Ertll 2009;Zilberg 2004). While their parents worked multiple jobs or dealt with their war trauma in unhealthy ways (Jenkins 1991), youth-especially boys-joined gangs seeking belonging and protection (Vázquez et al 2003;Zilberg 2004).…”

“…While their parents worked multiple jobs or dealt with their war trauma in unhealthy ways (Jenkins 1991), youth-especially boys-joined gangs seeking belonging and protection (Vázquez et al 2003;Zilberg 2004). As a result, many were imprisoned.…”