Cleaning San Diego: Migration, geography, exclusion, and resistance

Abstract

This essay analyzes the legal and spatial production of invisibility of undocumented immigrants from Mexico living in San Diego, something that Nicholas De Genova has called a “regime of deportability”. Systematic state restrictions and a legal system that criminalizes immigrants, especially from Mexico, are in practice a racialized enforcement of the law producing a condition of permanent “illegality”. This condition of “illegality” is lived through the very real possibility of being deported. To survive this environment, many undocumented immigrants from Mexico have become invisible to the rest of San Diego by relying on informal networks for information about jobs and avoiding surveillance by alerting each other about the presence of law enforcement. We focus especially on women employed in the domestic care industry, who work in private homes by the hour and use various city spaces to connect with and foster these immigrant networks. We conducted focus groups, in-depth interviews, and engaged in participant-observation in spaces such as churches, parks, buses, trolley lines, festivals, sports tournaments, and other places of reunion in North and South San Diego County. We conclude that immigrants find spaces for survival and resistance by cultivating solidarity ties through daily interactions in networks formed in public and semi-public locations.