Migrating Fictions

Front matter

MIGRATING FICTIONS

Migrating Fictions

Gender, Race, and Citizenship in U.S. Internal Displacements

Contents

Acknowledgments ix

INTRODUCTION The"Unprecedented" Internal U.S. Migrations of the

Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries 1 CHAPTER 1 The Economic and Environmental Displacements during

Introduction

The "Unprecedented" Internal U.S. Migrations of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

THE TRAIL OF TEARS (1838-39) is a name used to describe the mass removal of the Cherokee from their ancestral homelands in the eastern United States to Indian Territory in the yet-to-be-established state of Oklahoma. It functions in the popular imagination and in some academic texts as the archetypal example of an internal displacement. While the Removal’s forced nature is widely understood, its description as internal is problematic. The Cherokee were removed not from the United States but from sovereign territory within the larger borders of the United States in a forced march that crossed national borders. Yet many textbooks on migration still refer to the Trail of Tears as an "internal migration,’ which they define as “the movement of people within a specific nation? I highlight this discrepancy in order to call attention to the ways in which seemingly fixed terms, particularly “internal migrant,’ “refugee; and “citizen,” develop in relation to governmental practices and manipulations. In this respect, the Trail of Tears anticipates subsequent U.S. internal migrations (without being defined by them) by showing how governmental institutions employ uncertainty regarding moving peoples to promote particular notions of landownership and “American-ness” that would later continue to create a precarious citizenship for racial minorities, women, and the lower classes.

1. Henderson and Olasiji, Migrants, Immigrants, and Slaves, 2, italics added. See also Bailey, Immigration and Migration, 6.

One reason why the Trail of Tears is misunderstood is because of the hegemonic notion of an always already existing United States, a concept produced by the ideology that would become Manifest Destiny, in shaping a particular image of the continent marked by national borders. This hegemonic ideology had direct effects on the Cherokee, since the removal impacted those moved not just because they were taken from their homes and sovereign space but also because of the specific way the Nation was moved—under very harsh conditions that disregarded their humanity. The U.S. army rounded up Cherokee in surprise raids and held them in containment camps that were simple, fenced areas. This approach, often separating family members from each other, meant that many just had the clothes they were wearing, as well as little access to sanitation. Dysentery and other diseases flourished. They then traveled approximately 1,200 miles on foot and by boat; many traveled during the winter with limited food rations. The result was the death of approximately 4,000 of 15,000 Cherokee along the path.

My point is to emphasize not simply that the Trail of Tears was a forced migration, but that its method and logic were intended to assert the dominance of the United States over the Cherokee nation as a people and a place. While it is of course important to recognize the agency of individuals in such instances—the Cherokee resisted and attempted renewal throughout this process—it is equally crucial to see the forces and models that propelled the Removal in the first place and continued to determine subsequent U.S. governmental actions, which promulgated the notion of American exceptionalism and deemed that the United States was worthy of whatever land it wished without regard for those already on it

In this way, the Trail of Tears is a precursor to the examples that follow in this book. It is a part of an under-examined history of enforced movements that require further theorization because the Cherokee nation, itself a sovereign state but treated as a dependent people by the United States when it was convenient, was, during the march, ambiguously poised between two categories that would only be codified legally by the United Nations (UN) in the twentieth century: refugees and internally displaced persons. A variety of court cases during this time debated the “relationship between the right and obligations of individuals (citizens) and the rights and obligations of nations (states)" in regard to Indigenous peoples and whether they should be treated as part of the United States or separate from it.^ These rulings reveal that the

2. Sturgis, The Trail of Tears and Indian Removal, 58, 60.

3. Ibid., 65. 4. Barker, “For Whom Sovereignty Matters,” 2.

interweaving of land, identity, and power have a long-standing tradition in the United States.’

Contemporary discussions of migration continue to negotiate the categories of internally displaced person and refugee along with their affiliated concepts. The term “refugee” positions a migrant as an individual who, “owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that countrys This definition from Article 1 of the Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees in 1951 is internationally recognized, granting codified legal protections for refugees. The idea of the refugee is connected intimately to the role of the nation in migration, where individuals leave one citizenship-based space to travel to another space with the goal of eventually being accepted as citizens in this new territory. As human geographer Tim Cresswell states,

[Ihe refugee] is founded on the organization of the nation-state at the turn of the [twentieth] century in Europe. The drawing and policing of national borders, the firming up of state sovereignty and the construction of national identities were all necessary conditions for the production of the refugee as a person "out of place? The place they were out of was the nation and that was itself a relatively recent phenomenon.?

5. The Cherokee argued that they should be seen as maintaining their own sovereignty and that the existence of treaties with the United States was proof of their status as an independent state, while the United States sought to show that the Cherokee should not be treated with the legal power of international law by denying that they had been recognized as a political entity among "the general society of nations" (Johnson v. M'Intosh [1823]). Instead they claimed that "Indians had no right of soil as sovereign, independent states" (Johnson v. M'Intosh [1823]) because Marshall's Doctrine of Discovery states that "the appropriation of the lands for agriculture [. . .] secured the rights of the discovering nation to claim full sovereignty within the lands and against all other claims" (Barker, “For Whom Sovereignty Matters,’ 7-8). This view created a tendentious definition of how ownership rights worked so that European invaders could secure land rights while also ignoring the agricultural history of the Cherokee (12). See Barker, "For Whom Sovereignty Matters" for more on the court battles over sovereignty.

6. United Nations General Assembly, Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees.

7. Historically the documents scope was limited to events preceding 1951 and could be interpreted to relate only to exiles in Europe, since it was created to solve the itinerant problem after World War II. However, in 1967, the United Nations General Assembly Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees removed restrictions based on time and geography so that the language still holds to today. See United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, introductory note, 2.

8. Cresswell, Place: An Introduction, 183.

Until the refugee gains protection from the new state, this "out of place-ness" exposes the refugee to suffering and violence because he or she has no legal rights of citizenship.

Still, to understand migration via the refugees temporary in-betweenness with an expected resolution is already to accept a false binary, since many migrants actually move within their home country and therefore never technically lose their citizenship rights. Additionally, as Patricia Truitt has argued, by categorizing the refugee as necessarily crossing national boundaries, many who are affected but remain within the nation are vastly overlooked by international protection because of this “exilic bias?? In the United States, such internal displacement shapes the modern experience to a far greater extent than typically is understood. The disempowered status of a refugee needs to be seen as having potential commonalities with the disempowerment of the majority of migrants who travel internally within a country. Such migrants fall within the category of internally displaced persons (IDPs)—individuals forced into migration but still presumably protected by their nation state. The United Nations specifically labels them as individuals and groups who have been forced or obligated to flee or to leave their homes or places of habitual residence, in particular as a result of or in order to avoid the effects of armed conflict, situations of generalized violence, violations of human rights or natural or human-made disasters, and who have not crossed an internationally recognized State border.’°

It is important to note that there are legal protections granted to refugees that are not internationally guaranteed for the internally displaced, since the "responsibility for the protection of IDPs rests first and foremost with national governments and local authorities?" These internal displacements are acknowledged as one of the greatest humanitarian crises of our time, but since the legal protections of the internally displaced do not exist internationally in the same way as they do for refugees, the question remains, what hap-

9. Truitt, False Images, 11. As the number of refugees continues to increase, a "source control bias" has begun that looks at the country of origin to try to solve the problems within that nation so that people do not need to flee (Aleinikoff, “State-Centered Refugee Law,’ 263). This approach that could help many who are unable to cross borders has generally turned into an ideal of containment, since, as T. Alexander Aleinikoff has stated, "refugee law has become immigration law, emphasizing protection of borders rather than protection of persons" (“State- Centered Refugee Law,” 265).

10. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, 1. 1i Vieira de Mello, foreword.

pens when national and local authorities do not appropriately protect those who are displaced and are perhaps even part of the displacement problem? How do we see that rights of citizenship are often bound up in issues of law, property, and race that undermine the expected protections from the United States and the ideals of American exceptionalism it espouses?

By investigating such displacements at the national level across the twentieth century, this book works to fill in the gap left between international and national law by studying patterns of mass movements that are downplayed because a national boundary is not crossed. A fundamental question that any study of migration and citizenship must address is when and how to apply the term “refugee” as opposed to “internally displaced person.” Scholarly views on this question are divided because there are political benefits and shortcomings on either side. Some current discussions of the treatment of many people of color in the United States are attempting to address this gap by eliding the distinction between external refugee and internal migrant in order to show commonalities and thus achieve greater protections. Immigration lawyer and professor Raha Jorjani, for instance, has stated that many African Americans “would be able to demonstrate that they had more than a well-founded fear of persecution at the hands of their government” because of how they are treated by police, in prison, and generally by their own country, which would give them “a strong claim for asylum protection under U.S. law?” In her personal experience, writer Edwidge Danticat found that she was treated as someone “in transit as an unwanted refugee, not because she was an immigrant to the United States from Haiti but because she was black. In Danticat’s words, "Ultimately we realize the precarious nature of citizenship here: that we too are prey, and that those who have been in this country from generations—walking, living, loving in the same skin were in—they too can suddenly become refugees.” Both of these invocations approach but do not fully claim the term "refugee" for U.S. citizens; instead, they state that it is a position that might be caused via a rejection by ones own country. Such caution is necessary because claiming the status of refugee due to a failure in state support can paradoxically perpetuate that very failure. At the same time, maintaining a strict legal distinction between refugee and internally displaced person can obscure the ways in which various citizens have felt their sense of safety and protections to be compromised without hope for acknowledgment or redress. In addition, we must consider how natural disasters or other moments marked as "excep-

12. Jorjani, "Could Black People in the U.S. Qualify as Refugee?" 13. Danticat, “Message to My Daughters,” 207. 14. Ibid., 210-11.

tional,’ which are followed by states of emergency, affect the legal protections that are supposed to be guaranteed to citizens during migration.

Whereas the refugee is seen by definition as a problem of external migration, of movement from one nation to another that would alter that person's citizenship, the internal migrant theoretically should not face challenges to his or her citizenship when moving, though in fact such often occurs. A primary example of this problematic relationship was the displacement caused by Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall in southeastern Louisiana on August 29, 2005. The storm caused destruction throughout the Gulf Coast region, with an official death toll of 1,833 people, but even the authority behind this number, the National Hurricane Center, acknowledges, "the true number will probably not ever be known.” New Orleans, a city with a majority black population and often overlooked minority populations such as Vietnamese Americans and Latino/as, bore the brunt of the devastation after portions of its levees burst, submerging 80 percent of the city and causing the evacuation and displacement of over one million people. Since that time, criticism has begun to reveal issues such as the systemic racism and classism toward and within the city both during and prior to the storm in thoughtful and provocative ways.” Displaced people themselves even asked if the degree of flooding of their properties in the Lower Ninth Ward was exacerbated by this lack of concern stemming from historical racial problems. Gender factors are also beginning to be highlighted, such as in sociologist Jacqueline Litt's study that details how New Orleans women, living in a city where their levels of unemployment and poverty far exceed the national average, used community networks to get away from the storm and survive in its aftermath. These are the stories about identity and movement that need to be better understood for the future because, although the city and the region as a whole have been affected across racial lines, the region has lost hundreds of thousands of residents within the African American population, and women with children are the slowest to

15. Knabb, Rhome, and Brown, “Tropical Cyclone Report; 11.

16. Ibid. and Hori, Schafer, and Bowman, “Displacement Dynamics.” Importantly, though, there was at least one significantly sized group that had been doubly displaced—the ethnically Vietnamese community in Village de LEst who had been refugees at the end of the Vietnam War and who were now IDPs because of the storm. See Marguerite Nguyen, “Vietnamese American New Orleans” for more discussion on this community and the fact that many of them took both journeys together (117).

17. See, for example, Dyson, Come Hell or High Water or Bergal et al., City Adrift.

18. Elder et al., “African Americans Decisions Not to Evacuate.”

19. Litt, “We need to get together with each other.” Also for data see Willinger, Katrina and the Women of New Orleans, 6 and 33.

return. By contrast, the Vietnamese American community has had a high rate of return and the Latino population has actually grown; the specifics of these disparities should be better understood.2°

One obstacle in achieving this fuller understanding results from moments when white mainstream views apply the concept of the refugee to nonwhite and lower-class migrants that by definition separates them from their citizenship rights. During Katrina, questions of whether residents were perceived and treated with the rights and care afforded to full citizens can be heard in the diction used to represent their plight. The media repeatedly described hurricane victims as “refugees” when they fit within the historical category of internally displaced persons.” Furthermore, during the Katrina catastrophe, both human and natural, reporters spoke as though the situation had no antecedents. They called it “an unprecedented instant migration” with one important difference from some of the migrations that preceded it: “This group didnt get to make the choice about when to leave or where to go for a better life. They were simply wrenched out of their homes, and many had little, if any, say in where they ended up?” The media’s account became the dominant narrative of Katrina; these stories explained and perpetuated the idea that migration was typically voluntary—and in the distant past—except in the case of seemingly unavoidable natural calamities, for which the only response is pity. On many levels, however, the New Orleans disaster had previous models. The bias of the media and of the national response has precedents, as does the magnitude of human displacement. While it is important to note distinctions, there are many internal migrations with which to compare the Louisiana upheaval, some equally forced. Indeed, the United States was founded on the displacement of peoples: the European immigrants who sailed west, the Africans who were brought forcibly as enslaved people, and the Native Americans who were attacked, evacuated from their homelands, and then sequestered. The initial European invasion led to internal migrations, both forced and chosen, that speak to the spatialized history of the country—one that continues to be reflected in dislocations such as those caused by Hurricane Katrina. Lack of historical knowledge and appropriate terminology indicate the hidden sys-

20. See Willinger, Katrina and the Women of New Orleans, 30; Groen and Polivka, “Going Home after Hurricane Katrina”; and Geaghan, “Forced to Move 3. See Leong et al., “Resilient History?

21. See Sommers et al., "Race and Media Coverage of Hurricane Katrina" for its discussion of the "high likelihood that race played a contributing role" in the media coverage of Katrina (50).

22. Mankiewicz, "Ihe New Diaspora?

tems of oppression and the slippage in how the protections of citizenship are not equally meted out in the "refuge" that is supposed to be the United States.

This unawareness of previous events, especially those in the last century, as well as the racialized and gendered implications of the history and politics that went along with them, prompted my writing of Migrating Fictions: Gender, Race, and Citizenship in U.S. Internal Displacements. Additionally, the medias narrative about the “unprecedented” nature of Katrina points to a need for awareness about the stories we tell about our past. Who narrativizes such events, and how are the stories contingent upon the teller? From the Massachusetts Bay Colony to Ellis Island, from the cowboy to the prospector, migrations and their retellings—both historical and fictional—appear to represent a journey to freedom and individual self-determination often primarily focused on the white, male experience. This view, however, overlooks the major internal migrations of the last century that were largely compelled, not voluntary, and the variety of participants that were equally a part of U.S. identity and history.

This study seeks to theorize an alternate location that incorporates the acknowledged plight and insecurity of the international refugee (with its accompanying humanitarian, ethical call for action) into the category of the internally displaced person in order to address national constructions of precarious citizenship and their relation to movement; so doing will enable IDPs to seek social justice without inadvertently disenfranchising citizens of their rights. This book shows that the United States has displayed a history of spatial colonization within its own borders that extends beyond isolated incidents into a pattern based on ideology about nation building, citizenship, and labor. Considering some of the major internal displacement of the twentieth century together—the Great Migration, the Dust Bowl, the movement to and from the U.S. concentration camps, and the prevalence of Southwestern migrant labor—reveals a past imbued with (en)forced movements and community disruption that creates, in Zora Neale Hurston's oxymoronic words, "permanent transients" that are often race- and class-specific. Though each is seemingly a distinct regional phenomenon, these events and their fictional representations reveal similar tactics of displacement against the disempowered. This book investigates these events in relation to changing immigration policy; between the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 and the immigration reform under the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, the number of international immigrants was vastly reduced, and so the nations attention was turned to those within its own borders. Migrating Fictions is the first book-length study to examine all of these movements together along with their literature and shows that one of the trends is how enforced movement is often placed upon the laboring class and people of color. Mobility may mean freedom for the leisure class, but for the working class it often means a precarious life of endless migratory labor and the loss of a home space.

In other words, this book traces how Jeffersonian ideals of independent landownership as the basis for the nation are manipulated by various groups over time to move others—whether women, people of color, the lower class, or those who are seen as not worthy of the full benefits of citizenship for whatever reason—into disadvantageous positions and places. These exclusionary ideals of landownership reveal that the concept of the United States as a site of refuge is a myth. These government constructs, as well as how fiction responds to them by presenting alternative narratives and the possibility of “imagining otherwise; thus become key to the theory of movement and definitions of internal migrants because who is given or loses rights is based on just such stories. Only by first understanding the ways in which internally displaced persons are shaped as such long before any "disaster" occurs can we work toward a theoretical conception of movement and space that balances between the stateless refugee and the ignored internal migrant.

THEORIZING MIGRATION AND CITIZENSHIP

Prominent theorists have addressed the relationship among citizenship, the law, and movement in ways that are illuminating for my examination of internal displacement and the precarious life it tends to produce. My approach to the problem of citizenship and the law for internal migrants draws on work by Alexander Weheliye, Giorgio Agamben, and Judith Butler. Agamben and Butler are themselves responding to Michel Foucault's highly influential discussions of sovereignty, state power, and management. These theorists’ formulations of key critical concepts, including the state of exception, bare life, governmentality, and precarity, allow us to see how internal displacement is part of a larger nexus of political and economic forces designed to produce and maintain inequality, particularly in terms of race, gender, and class. At the same time, I suggest that this bare life and precarity are made more fully evident through internal displacement, which exposes the dominant governmental paradigm linking landownership and citizenship. The position of

23. See Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 5 for her important contribution of this term and its idea of seeing beyond the current situation.

the internally displaced can query the dominant view because displacement demands attention to the transitory spaces of movement.

Agamben’s argument about the "state of exception" and the production of “bare life? and Butler's about the application of governmentality help to pinpoint the ways in which displaced peoples tend to have their citizenship rights ignored or revoked in times of movement or crisis.^^ In Agamben’s work, the state of exception is the tool through which sovereign power is able to suspend certain laws because of a moment labeled as so unusual that the rules temporarily do not apply, but then makes these unusual moments usual, and bare life, or “life exposed to death,” is the potential violence from the state because a person lacks protection under the law.” Such concepts are exemplified in Agamben’s work about the Nazi concentration camp, which exists outside the normal juridical order and enables all violence against human beings by reducing them to bare life and by making the state of exception the rule.^5 Butler's application of Foucault’s term characterizes governmentality as “marked by a diffuse set of strategies and tactics" that "gains its meaning and purpose from no single source" and that “dispose[s] and order[s] populations [. . .] to produce and reproduce subjects, their practices and beliefs, in relation to specific policy aims?" My use of Agamben and Butler, however, is filtered through recent work that has questioned the elimination of racial hierarchies from the concepts of bare life and governmentality. Particularly I draw upon Alexander Weheliye, who is himself extending the work of Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter. By expanding the state of exception to include the kind of violence already part of the ordinary functioning of the law—as in slavery or the U.S. prison system—we can see how “different populations—often racialized—are suspended in a perpetual state of emergency.” In my view, this governmental system that creates gendered and racial disparities, while operating regularly in everyday life, becomes more fully exposed in the moments labeled as exceptional, especially when those moments occur around movement and migration. In other words, built-in exceptions to the governmental system extend preexisting acts of violence, revealing how controls on movement and freedom work within both the ordinary system and its supposed emergency state.

Bare life and the state of exception are important concepts for understanding the effects of governmental practices on changing notions of citizenship.

24. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 88; Butler, A Precarious Life, 52. 25. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 88.

27. Butler, A Precarious Life, 52.

28. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 74-88.

For instance, Agamben usefully points out how citizenship in general has been called into question by repeated invocations of the state of exception, which creates a "zone of indistinction" between the law and its suspension.” In his view, the refugee has taken the place of earlier subjects who were denied full inclusion in the state. This new exclusion eventually “introduc[ed] the principle according to which citizenship was something of which one had to prove oneself worthy and which could therefore always be called into question?* In this respect, all are equally disempowered by the undermining of citizenship via the state of exception and constructions of bare life, which have been employed in the service of political exclusion and genocide. Weheliye, by comparison, shows how the majority of these structures involve "other forms of political death" that do not annihilate subjects.? In other words, rather than using the Nazi concentration camp as the paradigmatic example of bare life, Weheliye suggests that slavery and the space of the plantation epitomize how the nation-state diminishes the rights of its people while still preserving their existence for labor. Additionally, he questions Agambens "zone of indistinction,” which claims that all are equally disempowered by this modern sovereignty. Instead, Weheliye shows how we need to see not only the particulars of how some have their rights withdrawn while they are still forced to serve the state through exploitation, but also that this withdrawal is often made unequally against groups of people who are marked as outsiders through categorizations such as race.”

Combining Agamben’s argument about the state of exception, Butler’s points about the application of governmentality, and Weheliyes awareness of race as a key factor in these decisions lends additional theoretical weight to the distinction between the refugee and the internally displaced person. By applying their ideas to the history of internal displacements and how that intersects with racial discourse in the United States, I suggest that forced movement, rather than being a mere symptom of other repressive forces, functions as a key for defining citizenship.

For instance, Agambens concept of the state of exception can be applied to some comments by the then mayor of New Orleans Ray Nagin. After Hurricane Katrina, Nagin said on multiple occasions that he had called for martial law, a right not afforded to a mayor; martial law was also invoked by Press Secretary Scott McClellan and only later denied by National Guard Lieutenant

30. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 37. 31. Ibid., 132.

32. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 35. 33. Ibid., 36-37.

General H. Steven Blum.* Since the city was not being run by the military but the military was doing supporting work for the city, martial law was never officially instituted, but its invocation does show several officials in power stressing that the basic rule of law had been momentarily halted, as in the "state of emergency" that had been declared for Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida.5 Under the state of emergency, the National Guard was called in to keep the peace, federal troops were brought in to provide humanitarian aid, and certain rights, such as the right to congregate, were suspended. Under a state of emergency in Louisiana, curfews may be called, traffic by vehicle or on foot may be controlled or interrupted, the possession of weapons may be controlled, the sale of alcohol may be prohibited, and the use of sound equipment such as bullhorns may be prohibited. In particular, what this meant was that some police officials in New Orleans told their officers that martial law did exist, which allowed them to "take back the city" by doing things such as shooting looters.” In short, a state of emergency is precisely the kind of state of exception that Agamben is discussing that allows authorities to change the law of the land. During Katrina, this idea led to guns being taken from individuals. The thinking goes that this is a necessary adjustment because only police should have guns in such a time. Therefore, the Second Amendment for gun rights was suspended, as was a basic understanding of appropriate punishment— death for the appearance of a petty crime. States of exception can and often are employed by those in power to restrict or reduce the citizenship and rights of already marginalized populations.