Central American Refugees Research Articles

‘Tangled times’: Central American refugee perspectives on the long Cold War*

ABSTRACT Between the 1970s and 1990s, state-led violence drove one-quarter of El Salvador’s population—most of them peasants—into exile. Studies of this phenomenon often adopt a bureaucratic, top-down approach, treating it as an anomaly, a problem to be solved by international leaders. Adopting a transnational social historical approach allows us to see this Cold War-era ‘refugee crisis’ as the peasants saw it—as part of much longer historical patterns of dispossession and resistance. This article traces their displacement narratives over thirty years. Drawing from two decades of work with displaced Salvadorans, public and private archives, and oral histories, it first brings to light how Salvadorans threaded together Spanish colonialists, Salvadoran oligarchs, US imperialists, and international humanitarian organizations into a noose of destructive outside interests. It then explores how, rather than submit to conventional portrayals of refugees as pawns or passive victims, Salvadorans identified as citizen-activists who harnessed displacement as an opportunity to continue progressing toward long-standing goals of building a more just and equitable world. Finally, the article moves to the present, as former refugees purposefully excavate the 1980s crisis to expose the roots of current mass migrations. The street gang wars that trigger today’s flights are nothing new, peasants argue; they are a living legacy of the Cold War. By emphasizing the past/present and local/global nexuses, these narratives recast the Cold War in terms of actors, causes, consequences, and chronology, while also demonstrating the value of looking beyond violence to consider the dreams of—and movements toward—a better tomorrow.

Descriptive Legitimacy and International Organizations: Evidence from United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

Despite the growing importance of race and gender on legitimacy in domestic settings, few studies have investigated this issue among international organizations. We examine this relationship through a survey experiment of American citizens’ response to an investigation of US refugee policy by a fact-finding team sponsored by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in the aftermath of the 2018 Central American refugee crisis along the Mexico-US border. Overall, we find that UNHCR investigation panel composition that has a racial and gender balance is generally perceived as the most legitimate. Greater racial and gender diversity consistently increases public perceptions of fairness and trust in the UNHCR panel. Second, the impact of diversity is conditioned on the nature of the UNHCR panel report. In the context of an undesirable report, greater gender and racial diversity increases respondents’ acceptance of panel investigations, suggesting that descriptively representative panels improve the perception of substantive legitimacy of panel decisions.

Liberal nationalism and Central American refugees: What is America's national responsibility?

AbstractIn an era of unprecedented numbers of migrants from the global south to the global north, nationalism has become synonymous with liberal states' ethnocentric, xenophobic, and racist immigration policies. The Trump administration's treatment of Central American refugees has been taken as a prime example. By focusing on liberal cultural nationalism, this paper demonstrates that these prevailing perceptions about nationalism are unfounded. Although liberal cultural nationalism has been accused of endorsing restrictive immigration policies, the degree to which liberal cultural nationalism's immigration policies are restrictive is context dependent; under certain circumstances, liberal nationalism may call for relaxing immigration policies to admit certain types of immigrants by invoking the idea of national responsibility. Consequently, liberal cultural nationalism offers one of the strongest liberal arguments for admitting certain kinds of migrants from the global south. The Central American refugee crisis at the U.S. southern border is analysed as a case study to illustrate this.

Negotiating Survival: Central American Refugee Women in Mexico and the Politics of Deservingness

This article aims to analyse the difficulties Central American refugee women face when applying for refugee protection in Mexico and how they negotiate survival during this process. Claiming refugee protection is an important legal mechanism to ensure survival, but managing this process successfully is difficult, not only because of the bureaucratic complexities but also because of structural and political constraints. Research has addressed the difficulties migrant women face while in transit and in the United States, but there is less analysis on the limitations in accessing refugee protection in transit countries such as Mexico. Therefore, this article examines the main barriers women face by considering the social and spatial specifics of two different reception sites, the southern Mexican city of Tapachula and Mexico City, in the centre of the country. Drawing on ethnographic field research and interviews with refugees and practitioners, this research seeks to understand women’s agency in dealing with adversity in reception contexts. Analysis showed that women need to engage in micro‐level negotiations with gatekeepers in host communities to gain access to humanitarian assistance and social rights. In addition, it has showed that access to scarce resources depends on personal performance in terms of vulnerability and “deservingness.” This demonstrates the complexities refugee women encounter in the local context, but also the role of institutional constraints to humanitarian attention in contrast to an integral understanding of rights. Furthermore, the obstacles faced by refugees and the generation of uncertainty and waiting must be analysed as a political strategy to prevent effective access to asylum in Mexico.

Politicized Refuge: Chicago and the Transformation of the Sanctuary Movement

Politicized RefugeChicago and the Transformation of the Sanctuary Movement Nathan Ellstrand (bio) "We are writing to inform you that today our congregation voted to declare our church as a sanctuary for undocumented refugees from El Salvador. On Saturday, July 24, we will openly receive a refugee family into the care and protection of the church. We realize in so doing that we will be in violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act Section 274(A)."1 In a letter to United States Attorney General William French Smith dated July 18, 1982, leadership at Chicago's Wellington Avenue United Church of Christ took a public stand on the rampant violence in El Salvador. It was the first place of worship in the Midwest to declare sanctuary, acting in clear defiance of the federal government and its intervention in Central America during the Cold War of the 1980s. The literature on the sanctuary movement concentrates on U.S.-Mexico border region organizers who provided refuge in Tucson and across southeastern Arizona, highlighting the actions of the Manzo Area Council, Jim Corbett, and the Reverend John Fife in declaring public sanctuary through the Tucson Ecumenical Council (TEC) in 1982. Lawyers, journalists, and anthropologists have focused on these individuals, emphasizing their religious and moral convictions.2 Since the 1980s, historical scholarship on the sanctuary movement has evolved from hagiographic accounts of leaders to works that place the movement in a broader context of transnational and borderlands history. Only one work examines the sanctuary movement in Chicago rather than Arizona; it emphasizes the internal organizational structure and gender dimensions of the movement instead of historicizing its politicized origins in the city a decade before.3 Although the initial movement to provide sanctuary—in the form of shelter, aid, and consultation—to Central American refugees emerged out [End Page 25] of the southwestern U.S., the push for expanding sanctuary came from political, solidarity-based organizing centered in the Midwest in Chicago between 1980 and 1983. Chicago sanctuary activists built on both the Central American solidarity movement and sanctuary in Tucson. They moved away from Tucson's localized, defensive approach of providing refuge on the border. Instead, Chicago organizers were steeped in the Central American solidarity movement, creating an interfaith coalition to proactively reject the Cold War priorities of the U.S. government abroad. Chicago activists politically weaponized sanctuary, using it not only to protect refugees, but to turn Central Americans' lived experiences into a sharp critique of U.S. foreign policy. This resulted in more than three hundred sanctuaries created nationwide by 1986, an example still widely invoked by immigrant and refugee advocates today. The Situation in Central America and Sanctuary in Tucson U.S. political involvement in Central America dates back to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. However, starting in the 1960s, Central America became a regional battleground of the Cold War. The U.S. and Soviet Union competed globally for hearts and minds, and a range of "hot wars" occurred within many Central American nations. The U.S. government actively sought to prevent the spread of communism and, ultimately, leftism. Guatemala's civil war between the state and left-wing organizations extended from 1960 to 1996. Ethnicity as well as ideology divided individuals of Spanish descent from the country's Indigenous poor and mixed-race people. The civil war in El Salvador occurred from 1980 to 1991 between the military government and a coalition of leftist organizations known as the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front. Nicaragua suffered its own prolonged period of revolutionary conflict from 1961–1990, starting with the overthrow of the Somoza family by the Sandinista National Liberation Front. Later, the Sandinistas fought the Contras, a coalition of right-wing paramilitary organizations. During the 1980s, Honduras served as a U.S. training ground for the Salvadoran military and for the Nicaraguan Contras; moreover, the Honduran state combatted its own leftist guerrillas.4 The U.S. intervened in all of these political conflicts, aiming to prevent the rise of leftist regimes in the region during the Cold War. The election of President Ronald Reagan in 1980 heralded U.S. government expansion of intervention in Central America, as the president [End Page...

Social Capital as Mode of Production: the Central American Refugees in Belize as a test case

Social Capital as Mode of Production: the Central American Refugees in Belize as a test case

Misrepresented Insecurities: An Annotated Interview about Displacement and Resistance of Central America’s “Eternos Indocumentados”

Central Americans are widely misrepresented in United States mainstream media as one-dimensional peoples always associated with insecurities. In a powerful counter-representation, Director Jennifer A. Cárcamo released her documentary, Eternos Indocumentados: Central American Refugees in the United States in 2018.1 The film lays bare the root causes of forced migration, criminalization, displacement, and multiple insecurities while highlighting stories of resistance in the isthmus and the United States. This article uses an annotated interview format based on an iterative process to analyze the film’s key themes as they inform and are informed by the growing scholarly field of Central American Studies. We call for critical analysis of Central America and its people within broader processes of neoliberalism and global capitalism to better contextualize insecurities and allow for more complex and accurate representations of Central American realities.

Place-Based Philosophical Activism on the US–Mexico Border

AbstractBefore the Department of Homeland Security instituted the Migrant Protection Protocols in January 2019, as many as 1,000 Central American refugees passed each day through Catholic Charities’ Humanitarian Respite Center, where they received food, clothing, a shower, toiletries, and sandwiches for the road. Sister Norma Pimentel founded the Humanitarian Respite Center in 2014 to “restore human dignity” to refugees who had been degraded and vilified during their dangerous journeys north, not least by way of their processing by the US government. Sister Norma has inspired countless people, including me, to engage with the community as a form of place-based philosophical activism, that is, of situated and engaged teaching, scholarship, and service. In this essay I read Sister Norma as a feminist pragmatist in the historical and philosophical lineage of Jane Addams, and I aim to provide an example of how a feminist-pragmatist approach can support and encourage philosophical activism in our communities. Feminist scholars can learn from feminist pragmatism the importance of “being-with,” “sympathetic understanding,” and “a larger social impulse.” Feminist pragmatism encourages academics to become place-based philosophical activists who use their teaching, research, and service in order to press for social justice.

Territorial Barriers—On the Border of International Law, Too?

Walls, fences, and other artificial barriers along national borders have been proliferating in response to a variety of perceived threats to sovereign states such as terrorism and drug trafficking. But by far the most significant rationale today for the construction of new barriers is in response to prospective migrants, ranging from undocumented individuals to massive refugee flows. The European refugee crisis, which reached a peak in 2015, and the repeated arrivals of Central American refugees at the United States border with Mexico prompted, respectively, new barriers in Europe and a determination by former President Trump to extend existing barriers in the United States along its border with Mexico. Often such initiatives have more to do with fear-mongering and other political motives than with effective control of migrants given the characteristic reliance of migrants on normal avenues of approach and ports of entry.

Crossing the Threshold of the City: Urban Refugees in Héctor Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier

ABSTRACTOne of the few novels in contemporary American literature representing the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, Héctor Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier serves as a historical text providing insight into a tumultuous moment in American history. This article examines The Tattooed Soldier as a literary documentation of the pre-uprising period at a time of severe distress in the city. The depiction of the Los Angeles uprising at the end of the novel dramatically draws a parallel between the civil war in Guatemala and urban discord in the US, with the violence reviving the traumatic memories of Central American refugees in the host country. The narrative framework gradually unravels the threads of an urban tension that has accumulated in the deeper layers of the city and finally erupts into “the great burning.” The documentation of a specific period before the uprising not only reveals the workings of spatial injustice in the city but also provides an alternative to the mainstream discourse that associates the Los Angeles riots with stereotypical images of African-Americans destroying public property. More importantly, Tobar’s representation of an urban everyday life that remains outside the official geometric city grid serves as a critical esthetic that contributes to the discourse of resistance among urban study scholars.

The Question of Sanctuary: The Adorers of the Blood of Christ and the U.S. Sanctuary Movement, 1983–1996

In December 1985, the Adorers of the Blood of Christ (ASCs) welcomed a Guatemalan family into sanctuary at their Ruma, Illinois, convent. Declaring their home as a sanctuary for Central American refugees who were denied asylum by the United States was the culmination of a selfguided and months-long process of discernment and education. The ASCs arrived at this decision after considering their order's tradition of providing refuge to Jews fleeing Nazi violence and after hearing calls for solidarity from Central American activists. Their position as women religious—that is, outside patriarchal church structures—gave them the flexibility to declare sanctuary when many Catholic churches and dioceses were reluctant. The ASCs' engagement with sanctuary challenges the common understanding that the movement originated at the U.S.-Mexico border with Protestants providing assistance to migrants denied asylum.

The Violence of Citizenship in the Making of Refugees

The Central American refugee crisis has been aggravated by the Trump administration’s policies, but this administration certainly did not precipitate it. The first half of this article examines the determinant role US policy played—and continues to play—in the violence that has sent tens of thousands of refugees to the US-Mexico border, showing how Carl Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction has repeatedly been used to represent Central Americans as the existential enemy. From Ronald Reagan through Bill Clinton, administrations crafted policies toward the Central American enemy, directly creating the gang violence in the Northern Triangle. This article considers if the cost of security for the US citizenship is borne by the insecurity of Central American citizenship. The second half of the article examines fictionalized accounts drawn from the testimonies of women held in detention at Dilley, Texas, the existential enemy par excellence of the Trump administration. The reasons for their flight elucidate the particular ways in which gang violence against them and their children is gendered, showing how heteropatriarchy is decisive in both Mara violence and ICE and Border Patrol response to that violence, as evidenced in the experience of these women and their families.

Topic: Public Safety

Not feeling safe is a global concern—one that drives Central American refugees northward through Mexico toward the United States; prompts U.S. Whites to call 911 on Blacks engaged in everyday activ...

Underground Railroads and coyote conductors: brokering clandestine passages, then and now

This article juxtaposes the Underground Railroad with contemporary Central American smuggling practices. Activists in the US Sanctuary Movement, seeking to provide safe passage to the USA for Central American refugees, summon the legacy of the Underground Railroad as a normative frame for understanding their mission. In the original Underground Railroad, a loose network of 'conductors' ushered escaped slaves north to freedom. In contrast to immigrant rights activists and slavery abolitionists, for-profit smugglers have been vilified as violent predators. Nevertheless, surprising similarities in social practices and relationships that underpin such dramatically different cases of migration brokerage point to the contingencies, complexities and ambiguous roles of smugglers. A counterintuitive comparison between the contemporary smuggling route and the historical freedom trail shows how normative imaginaries reshape social boundaries and territorial borders in North America.

‘What’s in a Name?’: Mislabelling, misidentification, and the US government’s failure to protect human trafficking survivors in the Central American refugee crisis

This article explores how competing and overlapping legal classifications such as ‘victim of trafficking’, ‘smuggled migrant’, ‘illegal alien’, and ‘refugee’ play out in the United States (US) immigration system. In particular, it focuses on the repeated failure of US authorities to identify and protect survivors of human trafficking who were victimised by the smugglers they voluntarily employed in fleeing their home countries—a scenario that is becoming increasingly common in the midst of the Central American refugee crisis. The article draws upon the authors’ experience providing direct legal representation to Central American migrants in the US to discuss how misassumptions about this population, a misunderstanding of the relevant legal terminology, and the US government’s focus on border security negatively impact the conduct of law enforcement agencies and immigration adjudicators. Due in large part to the US government’s increased restrictions on, and criminalisation of, many forms of migration, survivors of human trafficking who are victimised by smugglers often find themselves classified as ‘illegal aliens’ or ‘criminal aliens’, and their legitimate claims for protection are frequently dismissed for the irrelevant fact that they initially consented to be smuggled. Such mistreatment and misidentification fail to hold perpetrators accountable, and to offer assistance to populations that the US government has pledged to defend.

Derechos en crisis: Central American asylum claims in the age of authoritarian neoliberalism

ABSTRACT Drawing upon the insights of Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Gramsci coupled with ethnographic research conducted in Texas, this paper discusses how the Obama Administration sought to impose a state of exception on Central American refugees by attempting to suspend substantive refugee protections enshrined in international law, in the name of responding to a refugee crisis. The paper also illustrates how these efforts to create a state of exception have been challenged and contested by subaltern actors, in this case, a group of women and children hunger strikers and their activist allies in Texas. The article makes the case that these hunger strikers are part of an emergent Mesoamerican refugee movement that has formed within the interstices of the homeland security state. This speaks not to a “refugee crisis,” as many have posited, but rather to the crisis of rights regimes of liberal democratic states writ large in the wake of massive displacements of people from Central America, a region racked by almost 40 years of neoliberal policies, US militarism, and failed zero-tolerance security paradigms.

The Politics of Nonassimilation: The American Jewish Left in the Twentieth Century by David Verbeeten

Reviewed by: The Politics of Nonassimilation: The American Jewish Left in the Twentieth Century by David Verbeeten Philip Mendes (bio) The Politics of Nonassimilation: The American Jewish Left in the Twentieth Century. By David Verbeeten. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2017. 229 pp. From approximately 1830–1970 (and particularly between 1890–1950), an informal political alliance existed between Jews and the political Left. This was never an alliance of all Jews and all Left groups. But it was an alliance between key sections of the Left and key sections of politically active Jews at various times and in various places. Historians typically attribute this Jewish-Left association to a number of key factors, including that Jews were victims of both class and ethnic oppression; an implied association between Jewish religious and cultural values such as tzedakah (charity), tikkun olam (repairing the world) and socialist philosophy; the concentration of Jews in urban communities given that socialism was primarily an urban rather than rural or peasant phenomenon; the strong emphasis on education and intellectual training within the Jewish religious tradition that may have made Jews more receptive to ideas of social and political reform; and the fact that Jews were a global tribe and, as wanderers, had a much less parochial view of the world than other nations who were limited by national boundaries, cultures and traditions. A new book by Canadian researcher David Verbeeten proposes a new explanation for the ongoing Jewish-Left connection. He argues that Jewish Leftism serves as a means of preserving a secular ethnic Jewish identity in the face of external pressures to assimilate. He demonstrates that Jews in America have enjoyed unprecedented upward mobility since the early twentieth century as reflected in access to higher education and [End Page 317] professional occupations, and equally that antisemitism has significantly declined. Yet paradoxically, despite their growing affluence and acceptance, they have continued to stand up for oppressed groups such as the proletariat, African Americans, and even, ironically, the Palestinians. Verbeeten attempts to explain this sociological contradiction by exploring previously neglected case studies from three generations of left-wing Jews in America. The first generation, that of the mass wave of early twentieth century Eastern European immigrants, is examined through the memoirs of Alexander Bittelman, a prominent theorist and founder of the American Communist Party (CPUSA). Bittelman was born in the Ukraine in 1892 and moved to New York City in 1912. Like many Jewish radicals, Bittelman was not assimilated. Rather, he seems to have been influenced toward left-wing politics by his Jewish background, and particularly his childhood experiences of both poverty and antisemitism. Jews were disproportionately involved in the CPUSA, and Verbeeten notes that the CPUSA was significantly more middle class than other western Communist parties, precisely because of the presence of so many middle-class Jewish doctors, lawyers and dentists. These Jews appears to have formed a Yiddish-speaking Communist sub-culture comprising a close cultural network of friends, neighbours, work colleagues and family. The second generation in Verbeeten’s study is that of the children of the earlier immigrants who moved into adulthood during the inter-war period. Their experience is constructed through the anti-racist activities of the American Jewish Congress during and after World War Two, including its prominent participation in the civil rights movement. Verbeeten notes that the alignment of Jews (as one of the wealthiest subgroups in America) with African Americans (one of the poorest) in a supposedly common struggle for equality and social justice was increasingly rejected by many African Americans who questioned whether Jewish and black interests were in fact compatible. The third generation is that of the grandchildren born after World War Two, framed via their involvement in the New Jewish Agenda (NJA) from 1980–92, which supported numerous left-wing causes including gender equality, gay rights, the sanctuary movement for Central American refugees, and Palestinian statehood. This section adds considerably to our understanding of the revival in recent decades of Jewish-identifying groups on the political Left. NJA’s early endorsement of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict provoked hostility from conservative Jews. But notably its public critique of Israeli government policies such as...

Bordering a "Crisis": Central American Asylum Seekers and the Reproduction of Dominant Border Enforcement Practices

Bordering a "Crisis":Central American Asylum Seekers and the Reproduction of Dominant Border Enforcement Practices Josiah Heyman (bio), Jeremy Slack (bio), and Emily Guerra (bio) Introduction On June 5, 2014, the right-wing website Breitbart News released photos of South Texas detention facilities overflowing with women and children (Darby, 2014). The headline, "Leaked Photos Reveal Children Warehoused in Crowded U.S. Cells, Border Patrol Overwhelmed," demonstrates the role of contestation in shaping border policies. The photos show dirty cells, full of young children and women, often sleeping on the floor or with standing room only. While the surface message was apparently humanitarian, the evident agenda was to mobilize fear about a migrant invasion at the U.S.-Mexico border (henceforth, the "border"). Although the source of the photos was anonymous, it must have been taken by someone inside the Border Patrol or Immigration and Customs Enforcement since photography is not allowed and few people gain access to processing centers (hence, the term "leaked"). Reported by Brandon Darby, a controversial FBI informant who infiltrated the 2008 Republican National Convention and sent two protestors there to jail, the article has limited text, but asserts that "thousands of illegal immigrants have overrun U.S. border security and their processing centers in Texas." This publicity sparked an important turn to strengthening border enforcement and provided a nationally significant political symbol, both at the time and in the 2016 election. Understanding [End Page 754] the full impact of this event and the surrounding maelstrom of humanitarian and anti-immigrant responses to the increase in Central American refugee families requires a holistic and multiscalar analysis of contending actors and how they changed and reproduced that which we call the "border." Central Americans have migrated to the United States since the late 1970s in significant numbers, driven by a toxic mix of civil war, genocide, violence, criminality, radical capitalist change, and economic vulnerability (for example, see Jonas and Rodríguez, 2015). While they use a variety of routes and hold or seek various legal statuses, the principal path has been through Mexico, more specifically, through South Texas. Some apply for asylum upon arriving in the United States, while others attempt to cross the borderlands to the U.S. interior without detection. This basic migratory pattern has been long-standing, but the numbers increased dramatically in late 2013, with a marked peak in summer 2014, and oscillating ups and downs to the present. The composition and migration mode also changed, with increasing numbers of family groups (especially women with children) and unaccompanied minors presenting themselves to U.S. authorities and requesting asylum either at ports of entry or just inside the United States. So, while they are formally arrested, they are also initiating a legal immigration asylum case. This growth and change in Central American migration occurred side by side with a decline in Mexican unauthorized entries. Indeed, despite the Central American increase, total U.S. southern border arrests have declined, reaching levels last seen in the early 1970s. But border immigration enforcement has continued, and in some ways grown. This is the central paradox we wish to explore: In light of drastically reduced apprehensions, and the prevalence within that apprehension pool of law-abiding asylum seekers, we ask why has border immigration enforcement increased, not declined? Recent empirical evidence has linked these contending discourses about borders and immigration to niche right-wing media, and to the election of Donald Trump. The themes we raise here—contention around Central American migration of families and unaccompanied children, the political construction of border "crisis," and the symbolic and material saliency of the U.S.-Mexico border in immigration debates—continue to be central under the Trump administration. However, for this article we are focused specifically on the 2014 events, which provide an insightful antecedent to current struggles. Our theoretical approach for answering these questions has two thrusts. One is that the social world is constructed through contentious [End Page 755] politics, though such contention occurs within a wider structural backdrop (Tilly and Tarrow, 2007; McAdam et al., 2001). Contestation involves multiple actors coalescing and conflicting to seek social and political outcomes. Such outcomes are contingent, with multiple factors and...

School-Based Health Centers: Gateway to Resilience and Education for Central American Refugees

School-Based Health Centers: Gateway to Resilience and Education for Central American Refugees

The Illegalities of Brownness

In light of the current immigration debate, and in particular the state-sponsored carceral arguments most recently sparked by the arrival of Central American refugee children on the US-Mexico border, this article takes cues from the late José Esteban Muñoz’s call to sense the feelings of brown subjects. It examines cultural forms produced under the cloak of migrant rights movements to trace the ethical imperative of Brownness enacted by migrant sounds and visualities of loss. The article focuses on the cultural politics of digital art, music, and social media that theorize belonging and citizenship outside of the state and its terrorizing governance: the 2012 Dreamers Adrift’s video The Legalities of Being, by Yosimar Reyes and Julio Salgado; the 2007 migrant rights anthem “Pal Norte,” by Calle 13, the Orishas, and Don Cheto; and the massive responses on social media to a 2010 PostSecret card created by an “illegal” person. These cultural forms of migrant suffering render visible the centrality of affect and racial performativity to the undocumented student and migrant rights movements. The author argues that the brown feelings of migrant persons do not just refute the claims of democracy; the affective labor of their “illegal” cultural forms has the potential to radically alter sociality amid an anti-Brown world by endowing migrants and other deportable subjects with ontological leverage as a practice of everyday life under terror.