Speaking for the Refugee Other: Missioneering, White Saviourism, and the Politics of Ethnographic Representation in Luis Alberto Urrea's Across the Wire

Abstract

Luis Alberto Urrea's Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border (1993) provides a harrowing perspective on the struggles of a group of mainly indigenous refugees and migrants who live in one of Tijuana's many colonias—informal settlements with no utilities or public services—where they barely survive by picking trash. Written from notes that Urrea compiled while he was a translator for Baptist missionaries from 1978 to 1982 and then again in the 1990s, Across the Wire is deeply indebted to colonial modes of representation that have characterised Western anthropological knowledge production, and specifically ethnographic writing, from its inception. The memoir cum ethnographic work cum journalistic account aims to call attention to the hardships that refugees in Tijuana face and elicit sympathy for their plight. Yet, despite Urrea's intention to humanise his subjects, Across the Wire depicts them as helpless, in need of outside deliverance, and ultimately inferior to Urrea and his missionary crew, reproducing a white saviour narrative that reifies the myth of white, Western superiority. In the process, Across the Wire unwittingly reveals the pernicious workings of white saviourism and illustrates how it is contingent on an exploitative relationship in which the purported “helper” is the actual beneficiary.