Reinforcing and contesting neoliberal citizenship: Legal advocates and the asylum interview at the US–Mexico border

Riva, Sara; Routon, Erin

doi:10.1093/jrs/feaa066

Cited by 5 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 86 publications

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“…It contributes to making indigeneity one-dimensional while invisibilizing other Indigenous groups. However, as I argue elsewhere, CARING also engages in less visible forms of contestation in critical ways through, for instance, ensuring Indigenous women access to legal representation (Riva & Routon, 2021).…”

Section: Methods and Theoretical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 98%

Tracing Invisibility as a Colonial Project: Indigenous Women Who Seek Asylum at the U.S.-Mexico Border

Riva

2021

Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies

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In the United States, Central American Indigenous women who seek asylum are officially classified as Latinas or Hispanic. The erasure and consequent invisibility of Indigenous identity not only causes assimilation but also jeopardizes Central American Indigenous women's procedural rights. Using a transnational feminist lens combined with a Critical Latinx Indigeneities framework, and drawing on fieldwork research, I address the complex relationships of migrants whose identities are intertwined with geography, different states, and racial representations, while I claim that the invisibility of Indigenous women from Abya Yala who cross borders responds to the white settler colonial project.In answering the question "When is an Indian not an Indian?" María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo (2017) claims "in the United States an Indian is not an Indian when s/he is also African American or Latinx" (139). Indigenous women from Abya Yala 1 who cross the U.S.-Mexico border seeking asylum are officially non-existent-if they are classified 2 at all, they are considered "Hispanic" or "Latina". This paper analyzes the ways in which official regulations and on-the-ground practices enacted on Indigenous women from Abya Yala at the border contribute to their invisibilization. Practices of invisibilization of Indigenous Peoples take place all around the world. The fact that global disaggregated data on how these populations are affected by conflict and displacement does not exist, or how these are left out of global discussions on humanitarian crisis attests to those invisibility practices (Minority Rights Group International, 2017, 12). In addition to the effects of poverty, gang violence, corruption and insecurity, Indigenous communities are made more vulnerable to issues such as climate change, lack of land rights, and resource extraction projects. For these reasons, these populations feature in disproportionally high numbers among refugees and internally displaced persons (Minority Rights Group International, 2017, 11). Indigenous Peoples threaten the stability of the nation-state by disrupting and questioning its legitimacy, borders, laws, language, and so on. In particular, in the United States, Indigenous Peoples sabotage the myth of its construction as a nation-state was based on an empty land, or a "nation of immigrants". It was through genocide, land dispossession, disease and enslavement that the U.S. became the nation that currently is (Rifkin, 2014). Today, international and national treaties, agreements, and conventions, protect Indigenous Peoples all over the world from the violence inflicted in them in the past. However, their invisibilization has not been left in the past, as Patrick Wolfe ( 2006) rightly points out white settler colonialism is "a structure not an event". Indigenous Peoples today continue to endure violence and exclusion worldwide and are more likely to be displaced by free-trade agreements, the environmental crisis, neocolonial

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Section: Methods and Theoretical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 98%

Tracing Invisibility as a Colonial Project: Indigenous Women Who Seek Asylum at the U.S.-Mexico Border

Riva

2021

Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies

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“…Women who cross the USA-Mexico border seeking asylum experience great hardship during their journey, but also once they reach the USA where they are often detained and put in temporary holding cells to later be transferred to a detention center. In this particular case, women with children were taken to a detention center where they were held until they passed their credible fear interview (for more on the asylum interview, see Riva & Routon, 2020). As a female feminist researcher working in a non-profit legal aid/humanitarian organization with women who have experienced the violence of the asylum-seeking process at the border, Sara's aim was to center the practices that affect them.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Innocence and danger at the border: migrants, “Bad” mothers, and the nation’s protectors

Parsons,

Riva

2024

CMS

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Media and political discourse in the USA often depict migration as an invasion and people who cross borders as criminals dangerous to the nation. Through ethnographic fieldwork conducted in two places on the USA-Mexico Southern border, we want to analyze how invasion narratives influence practices on-the-ground. We first explore how these narratives inform the views of a border militia who see themselves as protectors of the nation and understand people who cross borders as threats. We then argue that migrant women’s presence in areas where the militia operates disrupts the dominant narrative that defines migrants as dangerous, as militia members come to understand migrant women as victims of the Cartel. Despite their innocence, to maintain the narrative’s consistency, militia members still consider migrant women criminals for crossing the border “illegally.” Finally, we move on to explore the materiality of these xenophobic discourses by examining how migrant women are mistreated at a family immigration detention center. Using the militias as an example, we highlight why political narratives circulate and have meaning for individuals and how discourses have material consequences.

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“…The first is structural/economic: namely, the rise of neoliberalism with the retreat of the state and its institutions in the provision of services has meant the privatisation of public goods, including as private corporations come to fill the vacuum left by public institutions (Pyles 2009). As neoliberalism has also reached the migration apparatus, governments have outsourced border externalisation measures not only to other nations, but to private companies (Infantino 2021;Pacciardi and Berndtsson 2022;Riva and Routon 2020). Visa processing, private detention centres, transfer of migrants, and so on, have all been privatised.…”

Section: Neoliberalism Bordering Mechanisms and Deterrence Campaignsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Performing Border Externalisation: Media Deterrence Campaigns and Neoliberal Belonging

Paynter

Riva

2023

Geopolitics

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Migration deterrence campaigns are part of a set of border externalisation strategies that extend one nation's border into other territories. Building on the literature of border externalisation, migration deterrence, and feminist media studies, we address these campaigns as critical performative strategies that enact neoliberal ideologies and depoliticise migration. We analyse three cases -two from the US and one from Europe -in which nations target would-be migrants with multimedia messaging to persuade them to stay home and become productive citizens in their countries of origin. We argue that these campaigns reify neoliberal notions of the moral, responsible citizen, and the criminal or bound-to-falter migrant. In particular, deterrence media embrace the paradoxical notion that migrants are responsible for making the right choice yet possess no agency. As our discussion demonstrates, strategies that discourage people from moving enact neoliberal ideologies that treat migration as a purely individual decision, decontextualised from issues of structural inequality.

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Reinforcing and contesting neoliberal citizenship: Legal advocates and the asylum interview at the US–Mexico border

Cited by 5 publications

References 86 publications

Tracing Invisibility as a Colonial Project: Indigenous Women Who Seek Asylum at the U.S.-Mexico Border

Tracing Invisibility as a Colonial Project: Indigenous Women Who Seek Asylum at the U.S.-Mexico Border

Innocence and danger at the border: migrants, “Bad” mothers, and the nation’s protectors

Performing Border Externalisation: Media Deterrence Campaigns and Neoliberal Belonging

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