State Disappearances in the United States: A Decolonial Feminist Analysis About the Enactment of State Terror on Undocumented Immigrants by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)

State Disappearances in the United States: A Decolonial Feminist Analysis About the Enactment of State Terror on Undocumented Immigrants by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)

Joanna Beltrán Girón

State violence in the so-called United States impacting undocumented immigrants living under the construction of (il)legality calls for a decolonial feminist enactment of psychosocial research. This article presents a multi-scalar analysis of the embodied aftermath of state violence, enacted through the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) practice of state disappearances, on two undocumented Latina immigrants. Centering on decolonial feminisms and drawing on liberation psychology and intersectionality, this study investigates the embodied sequelae of living undocumented under the terror of ICE. This study undertakes a secondary analysis of two interviews that were selected from a larger database of in-depth interviews (N = 39). The two stories were selected considering gender and explicitness of the embodied aftermath of psychosocial torture by ICE. The data was gathered in Austin, Texas in 2019, marking a year after the two largest ICE raids in recent history which together resulted in the arrests of at least 304 Latinx immigrants in Central, South, and North Texas. ICE terror has embodied, affective, and material consequences on those who are subjected to such violence; therefore, a decolonial feminist analysis about the embodied impacts of state violence and its sequela contribute to understandings of decolonial feminist enactment of qualitative analytic methods in psychology.

Keywords: Abolition / Crimmigration / Decolonial feminisms / Immigration and customs enforcement / Intersectionality / Liberation psychology / Psychological violence / Racialized embodiment / Settler colonialism / Sequelae / State violence

©2023 Feminist Formations, Vol. 35 No. 1 (Spring) pp. 240 –267

La mayoría de estas leyes y esto que está pasando es muy tensionante y es muy racista. Muy racista

Es que no nos quieren. Nos quieren a todos pa’ fuera

This paper begins with quotes from two stories. Considering these two experiences together generates a form of radical entanglement that allows us to closely examine both the individual and collective embodied impacts of the violent enforcement of settler borders. At the heart, this paper is a collage of conversations that gathers around the exchange that occurs between the Spanish narrations by Sabiduría and Amor and my theoretical offerings in response to those stories. Though I will offer non-verbatim translation and analyses in English with a few sprinkles of Spanglish, you will read the narrators’ voices in Spanish to remain grounded in their vocalization and because meaning is lost in translation. Importantly, the narrators come from different Mexican states, so they pronounce certain words differently or use unique place-based words or expressions that are commonly spoken in their places of origin.

Sabiduría and Amor, the two women whose voices are carefully uplifted in this article, articulate their own experiences as undocumented women migrants and from within these articulations we can understand how crimmigration operates and the ripples it creates. Sabiduría is a 53-year-old woman from Tamaulipas, México. Amor is a 49-year-old mother of two, also from México. Both have been living in Austin, Texas, for at least two decades. They live in the MéxicoTexas borderlands (not to be confused with living along the US-México border or border towns.). Borderlands are border/lands—territories that have been delineated with colonial pens that restrict movement and belonging. It is in this historical, political, ideological, and hemispheric context where the stories of the narrators are situated. So, this paper is concerned with how they articulate their lived experiences, and it also examines the racialized and gendered fashion in which state violence, through Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids, detention, and deportation, enact psychological violence. Namely, I argue that ICE is a state apparatus of repression that enacts violence on racialized undocumented immigrants through systematic abductions, widely known as raids, detentions, and deportations.

I spoke with Sabiduría and Amor in 2019 —a year after the 2018 mass ICE raids in Austin. Inevitably, the narrators carried an embodied historical memory of those raids. First, at the beginning of 2018, ICE conducted a seven-day mass raid where ICE agents arrested more than 145 Latinx migrants in Central and South Texas. Then in the summer, ICE raided a Load Trail factory in North

Texas where they arrested at least 159 undocumented workers. The latter was considered to be one of the largest immigration raids in recent history. According to TRAC Immigration, by May of 2018, ICE had arrested at least 27,657 undocumented immigrants in Texas. Based on the same dataset, in Travis County alone where the narrators live, ICE had arrested at least 1,161 undocumented immigrants. ICE arrests and raids are traumatic. This paper takes up an interdisciplinary analysis to explore both the aftermath of mass raids and living under the constant threat of being detained and deported.

Broadly, this paper is situated in a context where racial capitalism (Gilmore 2017) and settler colonialism (King 2019; Speed 2019; Dunbar-Ortiz 2021) structure oppressive conditions, infrastructures, and social relations in Turtle Island (colonially known as the United States of America). The territory that is known as “Austin” is traditional Coahuiltecan, Jumanos, Numu nuu (Comanche), and Tonkawa land. Austin gets its name from Stephen F. Austin, a racist white man who played a signi cant role in the expansion of slavery in the region. State: Historically, Stephen F. Austin is known as “the Father of Texas,” hence arguably he symbolizes the epitome of Man/the overrepresentation of human as Sylvia Wynter (2003) would suggest. Based on the historically symbolic constitution of this geography, we can argue that anti-Black racism as/in addition to state violence and settler colonialism are foundational characteristics of the state of Texas. In fact, Texas is home to 18 active US military bases and 171 military sites, including Fort Bliss—the largest military infrastructure in the state and the second largest in the army—and Fort Hood, located roughly 60 miles to the North of Austin, is the (third) biggest active-duty base of the US armed forces. Moreover, combined with 27 oil re neries, 57 state prisons, 30 modernday concentration camps (also known as immigration detention centers), and about 10,886 gun stores, Texas represents a militarized occupation on stolen land(s) touted by large groups of white supremacist nationalists (including border vigilantes/militia). Texas, then, is arguably the epitome of settler and imperialistic ideologies and capitalist infrastructures that justify the economic, political, and cultural invasions and interventions in other countries in the name of “democracy”; yet, domestically, it is far from a democracy. To be clear, the United States of America exploits, excludes, and punishes refugees who emigrate to this country to escape the poverty, violence, and corruption that this country’s imperialist interventions have generated and exacerbated in the refugees’ home countries and ancestral lands.

It is equally important to name the violence that is enacted across colonial borders, and in this case: México. Globalization and the rise of neoliberalism have exacerbated poverty as violence in México which is where the two narrators are from. Capitalism has re-structured the Mexican nation-state in ways that (re) produce economic and social inequalities and thus psychosocial violence (e.g. NAFTA). State violence, such as the criminalization of and violence against immigrants and refugees, is present across borders, especially now that the US

has expanded its southern border as far as the nexus between Central and South America through its Southern Border Program. For example, on March 27, 2023, a re broke out inside a detention center in Ciudad Juárez (right across one of El Paso’s border bridges) where 40 immigrant men were killed (and at least 25 others were injured). A couple of days after the re, I spoke to some of the immigrants who were camping outside that detention center and they told me that there is no way that the detainees could have started a re because they were stripped of their possessions upon entering the detention center, including any lighters or match sticks they would have had on them. In fact, VICE news released a news report claiming that the migrants died in the re because they could not pay a $200 bribe to be released. Local solidarity activists in collaboration with the migrants put up banners outside of the detention center with the phrases

“ESTADO MEXICANO ASESINO,” “NEGLICENCIA IGUAL A CRIMEN

DE ESTADO,” “NO ES TRAGEDIA FUE ASESINATO,”

“NECROPOLÍTICA LE LLAMAN,” “STOP CRIMINALIZING MIGRATION. CBP BLOOD IS ON YOUR HANDS TOO,” among others. Crimmigration, then, is an apparatus of state terror that in its coercive expansion to the south spreads violence against predominantly working-class racialized migrant bodies. My background informs my political scholarship. I am a queer immigrant from what is known as El Salvador. I am here in what is known as the United States because US imperialism forced my grandmother and my dad out of their ancestral lands. I am a third generation forced immigrant and an un/welcome guest on stolen land(s). I am also an anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, decolonial feminist organizer, activist, and psychologist whose commitment to abolition and liberation psychology are rooted in the radical history of student organizing in El Salvador. I am also a survivor and child of survivors of colonial and state violence. I have inherited a history of intergenerational trauma, including land and spiritual traumas. My body and spirit are simultaneously healing from and resisting colonialism, imperialism, fascism, and the racial capitalist cis-hetero patriarchy. My body bears the sequela of being in constant struggle. Fighting oppression has resulted in a painful in ammation of my body which is an example of how oppression is deeply ableist. Every day, I experience a chronically activated nervous system and an autoimmune system that ghts itself. But I am also medicine. I ght for self-determination and liberation through radical healing, decolonization, abolition, and also through the reclamation of my ancestral language(s), ancestral land(s), spiritual practices, Earth Medicine, dreams, creativity, imagination, and rest. Who I am—from the emotional to the cellular to the cosmic level—deeply informs my activist scholarship. As a human on this earth and an intellectual, I humbly recognize that I will always be a student. The more I learn from and with human relatives, non-human relatives, the land, spirits, and the cosmos, the more I un-learn, re-learn, un-do, and re-do. This article is one of the ways in which I resist cultural, intellectual, and ideological colonialism, imperialism, and (neo)fascism.

As you accompany me in this paper, my request is that you engage with the endnotes in ways that make sense to you. While the endnotes are used to weave the larger fabric of this text, they are alternative stories (McKittrick, 2020) that are meant to elaborate on ideas and highlight the interconnectedness (or contradictions) between conocimientos that may not seem related, but that are/could be.

Decolonial Feminisms and The Study of State Violence: An Interdisciplinary and Multi-scalar Approach

This paper is interdisciplinary and multi-scalar (Weis and Fine 2012). Drawing on decolonial feminisms (Speed 2019; Wynter 2003; King 2019; Lugones 2016), feminist geographies from Iximulew and Ecuador (Kab’nal 2010; Colectivo Miradas Críticas del Territorio desde el Feminismo 2017; Colectivo de Geografía Crítica del Ecuador 2018), in conversation with intersectionality as intersectional feminism (Crenshaw 1991) and liberation psychology (Martín-Baró 1988; Martín-Baró 1990; Martín-Baró 1994), I take up an analysis of racialized affect and embodiment as narrated by two women crossing borders, carrying the scar tissue of violence and the desires for liberation. Namely, I look at how state terror permeates the intimate (affect, embodiment: fear, nervios), personal (the materiality of structures: being rendered undocumented), and interpersonal level (relationships with others: how people treat them) without losing touch of the non-linear dynamism across these scales.

Informed by the narrators’ stories, Shannon Speed (2019), So a Zaragocin (2020), and Lorena Kab’nal (2010), I situate affect and embodiment in a context of settler colonialism which is enforced via state violence. In conversation with liberation psychology, I treat the psychosomatic experiences as embodied theory and legitimate processes of knowledge production that shed light on the ways settler violence pierces and permeates different scales, from the structural and cultural to the psychological and embodied. The visceral and affective are not separate from the historic, economic, and political.

Shannon Speed (2019) and So a Zaragocin (2020) resist the colonial constructions of borders and nation-states by embracing a hemispheric view rather than a national or transnational approach. In her writings on how settlercapitalist violence is rendered on the bodies of Indigenous women migrants, Speed persuasively argues that “spaces north and south of the [US] border are in essence ‘settler’ ” (18), and thus Indigenous women’s migration journeys must be articulated as movement between distinct settler spaces. Zaragocin notes that “there is a geographic transgression that we build by honoring a hemispheric gaze and not the one that results from a transnational approach. We are not interested in recognizing and legitimizing the colonial space of the nation-state. We do not need the nation-state, for a hemispheric view” (22). Zaragocin’s mirada hemisférica de-centers nation-states and opens up new spatial articulations such

as the study of geopolitics from our emotions and corporeality. While this paper takes a historical approach to contextualize the US as a nation-state, it also recognizes that settler violence is a hemispheric phenomenon and pursues an analysis of the sequelae of such violence by focusing on the embodied experiences of the narrators. In this way, I treat emotions and the body as affective geographic sites where violence is enacted, medicine is applied, and knowledge is produced.

Historical memory matters. We must remember that throughout the history of the United States, exclusionary and racist immigration policies have been designed by white settlers through settler colonial logics. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (2021) reminds us that, “the history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism. The objective of settler colonialism is to terminate Indigenous peoples as nations and communities with land bases in order to make the land available to European settlers” (23). In a 2020 interview with Latino USA about her book City of Inmates, Dr. Kelly Lytle Hernández emphasized that “immigration control is about managing the international ow of non-white workers into and out of this nation of settlers.” She adds that Black Americans and non-white immigrant workers have a shared enemy: settler colonialism, which renders shared experiences of being “surveilled, policed, interrogated, picked up, locked up, and removed from our families.” It is important to keep this in mind as this discussion examines how state violence (as an expression of settler violence) is enacted by ICE.

The experiences that I highlight in this paper are located at the southern border of the US—at a location where immigration and criminal punishment intersect. Structurally and analytically this project is intersectional. Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991) reminds us that structural intersectionality exposes how multiple de ned axes (race, class, gender, national origin) work as mutually constitutive structures that shape the lives of historically oppressed people. Our lives are impacted by the ways in which racist, sexist, classist, and ableist systems converge to create inequalities. For María Lugones (2016), intersectionality “reveals what is not seen when categories such as gender and race are conceptualized as separate from each other . . . once intersectionality shows us what is missing, we have ahead of us the task of reconceptualizing the logic of the ‘intersection’ so as to avoid separability” (4). In this paper, intersectionality helps untangle the hilos that connect the racialized and gendered psychosocial fabrics of the crimmigration system (Stumpf 2006; García Hernández 2014). Furthermore, I respectfully borrow from Kab’nal’s theorization of territoriality (which she refers to as territorio cuerpo-tierra). Lorena Kab’nal is a Maya Q'eqchi'-Xinka territorial communitarian feminist whose praxis is rooted in her experiences as an Indigenous woman in Iximulew (known as Guatemala). Kab’nal reminds us that territoriality must be taken into account when we theorize about bodies. Thus, the concept of territory body-land suggests that bodies, territories, and lands are mutually constitutive—when colonial violence

is enacted on territories and lands through, say, extractive projects (e.g., mining, water/land privatization) then such violence is also enacted on the bodies who inhabit those territories, and conversely, when violence is enacted on the body then such violence is also occurring at the land and territorial levels. The beauty of this framework is that it reminds us that healing and liberation are mutually constitutive in territories bodies and lands. I borrow from Kab’nal’s framework to argue that we must consider how the United States has constituted territoriality/borders in order to truly understand the stories of the narrators. It is in a territoriality that was built on slavery (McKittrick 2013) and genocide (Dunbar-Ortiz 2021) that (il)legality is conceived.

Moreover, Juliet P. Stumpf (2006) points that crimmigration is the merging of criminal law and immigration law. Crimmigration regulates “the relationship between the state and the individual” and is fundamentally a system of “inclusion and exclusion . . . [It is] designed to create distinct categories of people” and serves to “separate the individual from the rest of US society through physical exclusion and the creation of rules that establish lesser levels of citizenship” (380). When I look into the logics and the materiality of crimmigration—which rest on the colonial construction of the binary citizen/non-citizen—I expose the ways in which oppressive structures deliberate violence and wounding on racialized and gendered bodies who are situated at the intersection of borders/citizenship.

I engage with the narrators’ testimonies by naming the logics of exclusions/ dehumanization and the material infrastructures (ICE as a repressive organization) to contextualize the lived experiences of the two narrators who made this article possible. Rather than making claims about their stories, I seek to make claims from their stories.1 By refusing to isolate affect and embodiment or treat them as pathologies or as inherent states of the narrators, I make space for a territorial and land-based analysis that contextualizes the bodies as geographic sites where structural conditions are enforced and felt.

In an analysis of the coloniality of being, Sylvia Wynter (2003) articulates the “Human struggle” as one where Man (violently) articulates itself as the human through the social construction of the “irrational/subrational Human Other” (266) and, on the other hand, the defense of the well-being of those who have been historically rendered as Others—the colonized. Lethabo King (2019) adds that according to Wynter, the conception of humanity/Man is anti-Black and “to a large degree, anti-Indigenous” (18). Lethabo King also argues that the ‘human’ “requires the death of Indigenous and Black people” (21). King points out that white supremacy has de ned what it means to be human, and that part of materializing the de nition of this term/structure requires the death or recon guration of Black and Indigenous bodies into something that is other than/less than/different than the (white) human.

Furthermore, Hortense Spillers (1987) reminds us that the violence in hegemonic human-making is materialized through “lacerations . . . ssures, tears, scars, openings, ruptures, lesions, rendings, [and] punctures of the esh.” And

when we think of Joy James’ (2016) argument that “the United States’ longest war is with its domestic target: enslaved or captive black women” (255), we begin to see anti-Black violence (in the form of war) as historically organized as well as intentionally and systematically enacted on bodies that have been constructed as Black/Indigenous. After all, race is a social construct (Wynter 2003; Quijano 2000), yet its execution is materially and spatially oppressive and painful.

Further, Katherine McKittrick (2013) argues that the plantation can be used to historicize racial violence(s). We can migrate this place-based framework to the border/lands where there is a history of anti-Black racism. Then, we can see what emerges from this soldering of Black feminist theory/decolonial futures. In fact, McKittrick reminds us that “geographies described as battlegrounds” (7)—such as the militarized US-Mexico border—follow a geographic system that “came to organize difference in place and to regard this differential process as a commonsense or normal way of life” (7). At the root, anti-Black violence has profoundly shaped how violence is enacted at different scales and across different bodies in the United States. These relations are profoundly shaped by global and local histories and geographies. If we understand decolonial feminism(s) as anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist (Vergès 2021), then decolonial feminisms encourage us to critically think about the body in ways that question white supremacy’s de nition of the human. Coupled with an emphasis on affect and embodiment, decolonial feminisms add complexity to our understanding of the impacts that state violence has on racialized and gendered bodies.

Data and Methods

My research questions include: What are the embodied, affective, and psychological impacts of living undocumented amidst a constant threat of detention and deportation? And what do Sabiduría and Amor teach us about the ways in which state violence operates at the intersections of race, gender, class, citizenship, and territory?

Study Design and Participants

The narratives in the present article are drawn from a larger public health study (Pinedo, Beltrán Girón, Correa, and et al. 2021). I pursued a secondary analysis of the narratives of two out of the 23 narrators I interviewed in 2019. Importantly, this study took place in 2019, marking a year after several traumatic ICE raids (Aguilar 2018; Al Dia 2018).

While the study stands on the shoulders of critical epidemiological research, my paper uses a decolonial feminist liberation psychology framework to highlight the complex affective, embodied, and psychological experiences that show up as anxiety, depression, and other psychosomatic expressions amidst state terror. Following the narrators’ self-identities, I will focus on the ways in which the lives of racialized, non-Black Latinx2 undocumented immigrants are impacted by an

organized repressive organization: ICE.3 The narrators are considered undocumented. Narrators were not asked about their immigration status, instead, they self-disclosed their immigration status during the interviews.4 The two stories were selected considering gender and explicitness of the embodied aftermath of psychological torture by ICE. The sequela of detention and deportation, then, is the central focus of this paper.

In Their Own Voices: Stories of Racialized Embodiment, ICE Terror and Resistance to Crimmigration

In this section, I will introduce the two women who shared their stories with me. I tried to capture their wisdom, the power of their testimonies, the complexities of embodiment, and their subversive stories of resistance. I weave their narratives with what is known, from scholars and activists, about the enactments of state terror these narrators identify. I ask that you please hold the stories with care and appreciation because those voices carry embodied wisdom that exposes the perverted ways in which state terror is enacted on racialized and gendered bodies.

As a state violence scholar and survivor, I have learned to center joy and love when working with survivors of colonial and state violence(s). So, to disrupt damage-centered research (Tuck 2009), I use adjectives as pseudonyms to honor the relational affective processes during the interviews. In this way, every time you read their names you will be reminded of how wise and lovable/loving they are. I used thematic analysis to nd common threads among the stories. But most importantly, I let the stories breathe by not imposing theories on them. Rather, the stories speak for themselves, and I contribute to the knowledge the narrators produce.

Sabiduría, the woman who shared her story with me held tremendous wisdom about survival amidst anti-immigration policies in Austin. She is a 53-year-old woman from Tamaulipas—a state to the east of what is known as México bordering McAllen, Texas. Her brother was picked up by a truck after getting out of work six months prior to the day of my interview with her. In a heartbeat, he was just gone and became one of many who are forcibly disappeared in México amidst the context of a US-backed “war on drugs” and Mexican cartels. According to Carolina Robledo Silvestre (2016), in México, forced disappearances became an of cial category of political repression since the US-backed Dirty War in 1968. Forced disappearances, then, have become a dependable tool of political violence (Bourgois 2001), everyday violence (Scheper-Hughes 1992), and psychological violence (Martín-Baró 1990). Unquestionably, Sabiduría expressed feeling terri ed of going back to Tamaulipas in fear of getting kidnapped or killed: “Pues el crimen organizado se está apoderando casi de todo y es muy peligroso ahorita ir para México. Matan mucho. Yo tuve un hermano que me lo desparecieron. Ya tiene como seis meses de desaparecido. No lo hemos encontrado. Ya se desapareció . . . No sabemos nada de él. Da miedo ir para allá.”

The violence that is generated from organized crime is interweaved with other forms of violence(s) such as femicide/feminicide5 (Lagarde y de los Ríos 2005) or the state killing of women.6 The arguments about the origins of “woman” as a social construct vary, though there is agreement that women of color have been historically deemed inferior by European colonizers. María Lugones and Oyèrónké ˙ Oyeˇwùmí argue that gender (as we know it based on biological determinism) was inexistent before colonization, but that gender was created with the introduction of the Western gender system which gave women an inferior status to “ t the processes of Eurocentered global capitalism” (Lugones 2008 13). Others believe that gender-based hierarchies, including ancestral patriarchies, date to pre-colonial times (Kab’nal 2010; Segato 2010) and that violence against women has deep roots in prehispanic Mesoamerican times (González-López 2015). Presently in what is known as México, women are being killed “by everyone, from cartels and gangs to legal authorities, from strangers to husbands, fathers, and brothers” (Speed, 2019 42). In fact, Tamaulipas, Sabiduría’s place of origin, holds the second highest percentage (13.7%) of cases of women who have been forcibly disappeared compared to the national total (López 2019). Tamaulipas is a dangerous place for Sabiduría, and so is Austin. When asked to describe Austin, Sabiduría says, “Desde que hubo la bomba en las torres gemelas empezó a cambiar mucho. Nos empezaron a despedir a muchas personas. Empezaron a veri car los seguros sociales. Empezaron las rentas a subir mucho. . . . Hace como dos años me metí a un pasto y salió el gabacho bien enojado y le dije: “Discúlpame, es que me equivoqué y me metí.” Y empezó a gritarme “mojada” y que “voy a llamar a la policía.”

Speed’s argument that migrant women face violence(s) across different settler contexts is helpful here because it reminds us that violence, though it takes different forms and shapes depending on the nation-state context, operates similarly throughout the hemisphere. In fact, she argues that women migrants experience a myriad of violence(s) at home, on their journey, and in the United States. Sabiduría is afraid to go back to México in fear of getting killed and/or disappeared like her brother. However, the threats persist regardless of where she goes. In the United States, a gabacho (white man) threatened to call the police on her when she accidentally drove into his yard. In Texas, it is widely known that the police collaborate with ICE, so calling the police on an undocumented migrant could result in the detention and deportation of that person. Sabiduría is not safe in either place. Her experiences are de ned by a racialized sexist violence that is deeply intricated with her class status as poor/working-class and her immigration status as ‘non’citizen/undocumented. This discussion is concerned with how unjust structures travel across settings and create a myriad of inequalities that impact individuals at multiple levels (cultural, interpersonal, personal/intimate). These levels are webbed, violence ows, accountabilities are multiple, but the echoes of violence live in her body. Sabiduría has been rendered undocumented which has various impacts

on her life: from gabachos threatening her safety to social or state agencies denying her of important resources such as a driver’s license and rental assistance: “Yo cuando llegué [a Austin hace 30 años] todo estaba bien. A uno le daban muchos bene cios. Ahora ya le quitaron muchos bene cios. Las licencias ya no las dan, andamos sin licencia. Nos han quitado muchas cosas.”

Crimmigration is not just enforced by ICE, it is also enforced by the police. Sabiduría is aware that one of the ways in which immigration enforcement agents (ICE agents, and now also the police and state troopers) target racialized immigrants is by stopping them on the road: “a veces se paran allí en la 183, en la 290, ahí están esperando. Si ven gentes con escaleras, pues, paran y se lo llevan. Y ahora ya están veri cando hasta las placas.” Sabiduría shares that police tend to target racialized immigrants who drive trucks with step ladders on the back of the trucks because they have associated construction tools with ‘illegality.’ Not having a driver’s license can lead to a state disappearance such as an arrest, detention, and/or deportation. Moreover, not having a license generates fear and stress in Sabiduría: “Da miedo. Miedo porque ya uno no puede hacer nada. Yo tengo carro, lo tengo quebrado, pero cuando tenía carro, andaba con miedo. Pues ahora como no estoy manejando estoy más tranquila en autobús. Es mejor.” What is the context that renders women migrants like Sabiduría vulnerable?7 In 2017, Texas Governor, Greg Abbott, signed the Texas Senate Bill 4 (SB4), popularly known as the “show me your papers” law. This bill banned sanctuary cities and allowed police of cers, including campus police, to question the immigration status of those who they arrest or detain. Sabiduría comments on this matter: “El nuevo gobernador es Greg [Abbott]. No entiendo si tiene familiares mexicanos [su esposa es nieta de inmigrantes Mexicanos], no sé porqué es así. Es republicano. Ese puso la SB4. Si lo detiene la policía, lo pueden reportar a inmigración… Están veri cando las placas. Ya saben que teniendo un apellido Latino te siguen y te paran. Ay no, horrible . . . La policía les dio [a ICE] números de placa, números de luz, de todo eso… Austin era un santuario, ahora ya no.” Structurally, SB4 reinforces systems of (il)legality and crimmigration that institutionally marginalize, exclude, and punish racialized undocumented immigrants. Broadly, I argue that the undocumented immigrants who are predominantly targeted by laws such as SB4 are those who are criminalized based on their race or ethnicity and skin color, namely those who come to the United States from the Global Majority/Global South.8 Sabiduría is a brown-skinned woman and an immigrant from México who speaks with a thick English accent.

Emotionally, SB4 has created a context of unsafety for undocumented women migrants like Sabiduría. To put it in her words: “Da miedo. Miedo porque ya uno no puede hacer nada. Yo no tengo carro, lo tengo quebrado, pero cuando tenía carro, no hombre, andaba con miedo . . . Yo me pongo a veces depresiva, a veces no sé, piensa uno "Me van a agarrar, me van a pegar." Es difícil . . . Que a veces uno no puede dormir. Uno no duerme, uno no descansa bien.” Sabiduría’s experiences with fear, depression, and trauma-related insomnia are

examples of racialized affective embodiment. In the 1980s, psychologist Adrianne Aron treated Salvadoran refugees who forcibly emigrated to the United States in search for safety to escape a US-backed civil war in El Salvador. Aron noticed that the refugees reported experiencing anticipatory fear which became evident when they indicated becoming conscious about trivial behavior such as opening the door to exit, choosing a road over another to go to work, limiting the places they can go, and what and who they should speak to. With this in mind, anticipatory fear refers to when “people dedicate a great deal of psychic energy to evaluate and avoid dangers in a manner that can be predictable” (1987, 467).9 Sabiduría no longer has a car, but she when did she expressed feeling fear when she was on the road in anticipation of a potential arrest, detention, and/or deportation. Her anticipatory fear of being stopped by the police while driving caused her great distress, so much so that she would not sleep, worried that the police would stop and arrest her (and turn her over to ICE) for not having a driver’s license or that another driver would hit her which could lead to the presence of the police, which could ultimately result in an arrest, and if turned into ICE, a deportation. That said, it is critical to name that while fear can generate great distress, it is also a sacred protective mechanism that has helped Sabiduría navigate dangerous places and situations. That is, Sabiduría’s body is wise and so is her fear.

Racialized affect and embodiment are interrelated with gendered mechanisms of oppression. Racialized affect and embodiment make a call for a practice of leaning into somatic experiences, but most importantly these visceral experiences highlight the ways in which capitalism racializes and genders bodies. Punishment is enacted in those accords because punishment is in the esh (Richards-Calathes 2021). Though some may not consider detentions and deportations as punishment, the affective consequences of them say otherwise. Sabiduría talks about the aftermath post-deportation of an ex-boyfriend when they lived in Ohio:

Le quitaron la troca y las herramientas… Se supone que son 24 horas de detención, pero lo tuvieron cinco días detenido. Sin ningún cargo. No había hecho nada. Lo tuvieron detenido hasta que fue inmigración por él… Me afectó mucho. Era mi novio . . . Me quedé sola porque él era el que trabajaba yo no tenia trabajo en ese tiempo. Tuve que volver a empezar de nuevo . . . las mujeres nos quedamos solas porque estamos acostumbradas de mujeres [a que los hombres trabajen], y los hombres están acostumbrados a ayudarnos con los billes [gastos] . . . [Los hombres] son los que nos mantienen la casa . . . Nos apoyan mucho económicamente y cuando se lo llevan pues nos quedamos sin ese apoyo y no podemos a veces solas . . . Uno queda en shock pensando:

“¿Cómo le voy a hacer? ¿Cómo voy a pagar la renta?” porque desgraciadamente ellos ganan un poco más que nosotras las mujeres, y especialmente si somos Latinas porque las blancas tienen otro salario.

Sabiduría highlights both the economic and gendered sequelae of a deportation. She stresses that the deportation of her ex-boyfriend economically impacted her because she was not employed at the time. Labor is gendered in many traditional Latinx households. While men are encouraged to occupy the public space, earn an income, and take on the role of the breadwinners, women are expected to remain in the private space (home) to perform unpaid care work, emotional and domestic labor. Sabiduría acknowledges the gendered division of labor and stresses that there is a “shock” (economic, emotional, and moral) when the breadwinner is no longer able to provide due to a deportation.

Circling back to the main idea of this paper, according to the MerriamWebster dictionary, a sequela / noun / is an aftereffect of a disease, condition, or injury; and based on the wisdom I have learned from migration justice organizers and activists,10 I want to uplift the voices that view detentions and deportations as systematic abductions/forced disappearances. In this case, this paper is interested not just in the sequelae of a detention or deportation but on the affective experiences of living under the terror of a detention and/or deportation. Based on my experience as a survivor/child of survivors and in my organizing and commitment for truth and justice, viewing detentions and deportations as state disappearances and kidnappings is arguably an accurate claim because those who know someone who has been “detained” and/or “deported” may experience a form of affective and embodied susto/shock—as well as other emotions and physiological reactions – similar (but not necessarily equal) to those who experience other forms of state disappearances (e.g., under contexts of high intensity con ict/warfare and militarized occupations). Namely, ICE raids, detentions, and deportations generate a painful aftereffect among the survivors and their impacts create rippling effects (“nervios”) across communities.

Forced disappearances during warfare have been used as psychological tactics to instill fear among community members (e.g., ‘this could happen to me’) and to completely remove the body politic for its political potential to transform oppressive conditions. Moreover, forced disappearances/kidnappings in the fashion of raids/arrests, detentions, and deportations also remove the body politic from communal networks of care and ultimately from its means of production. As we think of different enactments of forced disappearances, we see that there is an intentional strategy to spread terror, weaving the affective sequelae of forced disappearances across the hemisphere. In such cases terror does not cease with the victim’s death [or disappearance], because it is only after the death [or disappearance, which can actually lead to death] that the acts accomplish their purpose—to show others that this could happen to them as well (Menjívar and Rodríguez 2005).

Though the structural conditions can be different between a context of warfare, political repression, geno/ethnocides (e.g., the Dirty War in Argentina; Pinochet’s military dictatorship in Chile post US-backed coup; El Salvador in the 1980s; Ríos Montt’s military dictatorship and genocide of Mayan people in

Iximulew in the 1980s; the 43 students disappeared in Ayotzinapa, México in 2014), and a context of repressive violence amidst places that feel like warfare but are not of cially declared as such (like in the United States where fascist domestic terrorism/mass shootings by white supremacists remind us that (often) armed white men, including police of cers across the racial spectrum, take on a lethal approach to eliminating who they consider to be non-human/less than human), the repressive tactic of disappearing people/bodies for their political potential and to spread terror share similarities. Therefore, I would like to focus on the condition of the aftermath expressed in chronic emotional injuries as well as the somatic and psychosocial weathering and psycho-emotional maiming which is evident Sabiduría’s story. Though it is important to recognize that her pain does not eliminate her agency and ability to resist. State terror, administered via psychological terror, generates a deeply embodied psychosomatic sequela that travels with the bodies as they move and navigate territories. This sequela is a constant present.

Like with any abduction, forced disappearances ripple across. Entire families and communities are impacted by them. Sabiduría expresses: “[Una deportación] le cambia la vida a uno. Tanto a ellos como que a uno. Le cambia la vida en cinco minutos ya uno queda hasta en shock.” The fear of detention and deportation impacts collectives alike. That is, the fear of is enough to keep undocumented immigrants in a chronic state of terror, anxiety, and silence. Sabiduría elucidates this statement: “Mis amigas han sentido ese rechazo [sentimientos anti-inmigrantes]. Se siente enojo, rabia por todo. Mujeres que se han peleado con mujeres anglosajonas, y lo primero que les han dicho: “Voy a llamar a inmigración.” Ya uno no puede pelearse. A veces se queda uno con el enojo dentro de que uno no puede defenderse.”

Sabiduría shares that there have been times when white women have been racist toward her friends and have made xenophobic threats such as calling immigration of cials on them. She adds that when things like this happen, the anger stays with her because she was not able to release it at the time of the verbal assaults / threats. Instead, she stresses, “ya lo que hace uno es callarse y tirarse al cuarto”; she stays silent and goes to her room, presumably to cry. While there is no way to know whether someone is undocumented or not, a white supremacist culture of Othering informs and conditions privileged groups into discriminating against others based on someone’s physical appearance (e.g., skin tone, height, hair color/texture, etc). Affect that intersects with class, race, and gender-based oppression highlights the racialized anger, rage, and weathering that results from those racist encounters. Racialized embodiment reminds us that affect such as sadness, indignation, anger, and rage that result from navigating and enduring racism get stored in the body which can ultimately lead to a chronic state of fear, terror, anxiety, depression, and a series of health consequences.

But Sabiduría is not naïve. She knows why things are the way they are. She knows structural inequalities are at play and she knows her power: “No nos

quieren. Nos quieren a todos para fuera. Ellos quieren que no existamos porque su raza de ellos se está terminando. [Pero] nosotros somos fuertes y trabajadores.” Though she shared experiencing an array of emotions—from rage and sadness to fear—she is not de ned by them. Sabiduría is a strong, generous, and wise woman who donated her story to create a positive impact. Her hope is that her story can push for social change so that cities like Austin offer mental health resources to undocumented immigrants because she has noticed that many of them suffer from anxiety, depression, and nervios that result from navigating injustices.

The affective and embodied sequela of state terror is also present in the second narrator. Amor is a 49-year-old woman and undocumented immigrant from México. She is a mother of two and a caregiver for her mother. In the name of immigration justice, Amor encourages her undocumented friends and mothers to use their voices to call out racism. I was inspired by her amor (love) for her family, community, and social transformation. Amor has lived in Austin for two decades and has seen an array of changes in the city. She has noticed that xenophobia has increased in Austin especially since former president Donald Trump was elected. She is considering moving out of her two-bedroom apartment but suspects that she and her family will encounter racism and inequality everywhere they go. Amor says, “[Austin es menos amigable] con las políticas que han hecho, con el presidente nuevo que está que ha hecho más políticas anti-inmigrantes. De hecho, yo me quiero mover de Austin para otro lado, pero pues, como que en todas partes es igual.”

Moreover, it is worth noting that structural injustices generate material conditions that lead to heightened vulnerabilities among undocumented immigrants. For example, Amor reports that they live in an apartment complex where her white neighbors consume and sell drugs which rst, expose her children to those activities and substances, and second, leads to heavy police presence. On one occasion, there were 12 police cars surrounding the apartment: “Nos habíamos salido a una esta y regresamos y estaban como doce patrullas porque había arriba unos vendedores de drogas . . . Hay [norte] americanos vendiendo drogas y eso nos perturba a todos.” Sometimes the police place restrictions on exit and entry, and when this happens, Amor and her family stay at a friend’s house until the police is gone. Understandably, she does not trust the police:

Ahora la gente no reporta muchas cosas. La otra vez me robaron mi carro y hable a la policía pero no era [durante] las redadas, todavía no estaba el SB4.

Ahorita ya no hablaría . . . Yo a la policía se los he dicho cuando hay café: “yo no confío en ustedes. Yo no les hablara a ustedes si a mí me pasaría algo porque ustedes están con ellos [ICE].” Ya para mi un policía no signi ca con anza. Si tengo un problema pues me callo, lo resuelvo yo, o me muevo. Hasta mi hijo les ha dicho [en los cafés]: “pues ustedes cooperan con la migración.” Le dije a ellos [los policías]: “mi hijo estaba pero sorprendido de ver cómo la policía ayudaba

[a los agentes de migración].” Hay mucha descon anza, mucha inseguridad. Y ellos supuestamente dicen que esas leyes [como SB4] son para estar seguros.

In the above-stated vignette, Amor describes that she stopped calling the police for help after SB4 was passed and after she heard about the ICE raids. Now when she needs help, she either stays quiet or tries to solve it on her own. However, there was one place where she felt somewhat safer to be near the police: at the cafés, or as they are of cially known ‘Coffee with a Cop.’ These events invite the community to mingle with Austin police. At the cafés, Amor’s disabled son told police of cers that they do not trust them anymore because they cooperate with ICE. Amor elaborated on her son’s statement and told the of cers that her son was shocked to learn that the police collaborate with immigration agents. The police agents, to none of our surprise, responded with “es que nosotros tenemos que ayudar.”

Another reason why Amor and her family no longer trust the police is that the police have harassed and intimidated minors at her son’s school inquiring about their parents’ immigration status. Amor narrates: “Dice mi hijo que allí en la escuela cerquitas estaba una tiendita. Y hasta a los niños la policía, los de migración, les preguntaba: “Y tus papás, ¿son de México? ¿Tienen papeles?”

Cuando ellos lo único que querían era ir a comprar su lonche, unas papitas, una soda… Ellos están haciendo algo ilegal que es acosar a nuestros hijos en los campus [de las escuelas] . . Entonces, tiene que haber protección y nosotros no queremos que nos hostiguen a nuestros hijos, o vamos a hacer una acción legal.”

Arguably, for many immigrant children and children of immigrant parents, their schools are not safe and can feel like “sites of toxicity,” as McKittrick would argue. In a context like this, from an early age, immigrant children and children of immigrant parents might become fearful and anxious about their safety and the safety of their parents or caregivers. This could become a core wound which could perhaps lead to a fear of abandonment and a sense of unsafety in their childhood which could show up in their adulthood. Moreover, laws like SB4 have led to an enactment of a culture of difference-making among young students: “En febrero que hubo una redada a los niños les decían otros niños en las escuelas: ‘Ya se van a llevar a tus papás.’ Y tuvimos que hablar con los directores.” Amor stresses that, immediately after the February ICE raids, a group of parents spoke to the principal after they heard that some students teased their children with threats that ICE was going to take their parents away. Furthermore, Amor describes the impact that ICE raids have had on children: “Los niños van con miedo porque no saben si sus papás van a regresar. Yo estaba en un grupo de inmigración y allí no enseñaron muchos derechos y fuimos al capitolio pues a dar nuestros testimonios. Ahí también los maestros hasta lloraban porque dicen que a muchos niño les afecta psicológicamente.”

While on a trip to the Capitol Building for an immigration training, she witnessed a group of teachers giving emotional testimonies about the

psychological impact that ICE raids have had on their young students. She also stresses that now children go to school with fear because they do not know if their parents are going to go back to pick them up from school. Moreover, after the February raids, her son told her that ICE deported one of his classmates’ mom: “[La mamá] se fue al H-E-B para comprar la comida para cuando el niño llegará. Y a su mamá la agarró la migración.” The boy’s mom was detained while she was getting groceries at H-E-B (a supermarket chain). ICE deported her. The boy cried and cried ‘mommy’ at school every day after the deportation of his mom. Amor elaborates: “Dice [mi hijo] que ese niño pues se regresó para México. Dice: "lloraba y lloraba ‘mami’ allí en la escuela." Porque, ¿qué hizo su mamá? Ir para la comida. Para prepararle su comida. Pienso, “¿Y si sería mi caso?” Y pues nuestros hijos son niños que están estudiando. Y son niños que están haciendo mucho esfuerzo para que tengan tanta hostilidad y para que tengan sus padres tanta hostilidad.”

Amor further commented that the boy whose mom was deported returned to México, likely to reunite with his mom. The above vignette demonstrates that detentions and deportations impact, materially and psychologically, not just those who are detained and/or deported but kinship networks. Arguably, detentions and deportations are techniques of psychosocial and political violence that are targeted not just at individuals, but families and collectives. This violence is not isolated, but intentionally and systematically enacted on racialized bodies that the state has rendered undocumented. Moreover, while recounting a different story of deportation, Amor tells me that her friend’s daughter witnessed when ICE agents detained her uncle and that the girl always remembers that moment. Let’s read directly from Amor: “Ver a los niños que también se llevan a sus familiares es un estrés. A una amiga dice que su hija miró cuando se llevó la migración a su tío y ella siempre se acuerda de eso. No se le olvida. Es un trauma para los niños. . . .” Children can experience trauma when they witness the detention of a relative, Amor stresses. One of the arguments I highlight in this paper, based on the testimonies of Sabiduría and Amor, is that ICE detentions and deportations are enactments of state violence/state torture, and that this violence spreads fear and terror among those who have been rendered undocumented and their families. Amor also reported that the raids are larger now: “son más grandes. Yo una vez miré como en el 7-Eleven andaban buscando gente que trabajaba sin papeles allí.” That is, while carrying out her daily activities, she saw ICE going inside a 7-Eleven store to look for undocumented workers. At this point, arguably, the violence that is enacted by ICE has become habitual because it shows up while people are carrying out mundane, everyday activities, such as driving around, going to the store, or going to work.

Psychologists and sociologists interested in state violence have noted that fear is an affective mechanism of state repression and control (Martín-Baró 1990; Menjívar and Rodríguez 2005). Fear is an instrument of state terror and state terror is supposed “to engender fear in everything people do” (Menjívar and

Rodríguez 2005, 17) like going to H-E-B or a 7-Eleven. State terror is mediated by the logics of dehumanization, punishment, and fear, and in the context of these stories, I argue that the United States relies on forced family separation to continue to consolidate its power and hegemony and spread fear. Thus, such fear can be articulated as a colonial breaking technique: a form of emotional maiming, a strategy used to break a target’s will. That is, a (neo)fascist technique of psychological warfare that is inherently ableist. Within a context of state terror, fear can be “linked to uncertainty regarding the conservation and development of one's life and family and it is expressed in how we fear misfortune, disaster, ruin, misery, and the future . . . [F]ear is an intense emotion, which indicates that the meaning that the person attributes to the situation in which they nd themselves, is of danger and the person perceives and understands it as a vital threat” (Lira Kornfeld 1987, 177). Family separation is a tactic of state violence—a breaking technique—that ruptures the social fabric and induces fear, and such fear holds historical meaning. We cannot ahistoricize or dis-embody emotions in contexts of state violence, settler colonialism, and the rise of neofascism. Racialized embodiment and affect remind us that state terror, such as family separation and abductions at the hands of ICE, impacts individuals and collectives at the emotional, physiological, and psychological levels. Unjust structures rely on and reproduce violence that is visceral. For example, detentions and deportations are really distressing for Amor: “Pues estresada. Yo no podía dormir cuando eran las redadas. [Los niños] estaban en una escuela charter. A partir de ahí los puse en una escuela pública para ya no manejar. Pero yo tengo un niño en silla de ruedas y a él se le pasa el camión [bus escolar]. Como quiera lo tengo que llevar. Muchos policías detienen a la gente que maneja y no tiene licencia. Siempre tengo que ir viendo que no haga velocidad, y es mucho estrés.”

Stress and tension are deeply racialized visceral experiences in Amor’s life. After the raids, Amor reported not being able to sleep. She was stressed out and tense. She decided to transfer her children from a charter school to a public school to drive less and avoid encountering ICE agents. She reports that around the time of the raids, many police agents were detaining drivers who did not have a driver’s license. It is a lot of stress, she highlights. Moreover, Amor names that the stress she feels comes from many different factors, including: “¿Y qué hago yo? Estar criando a un niño que está en silla de ruedas que quiero que tenga un futuro . . . Recibo tanto estrés de muchas partes, y no es justo . . . Mi hijo usa medicamentos, es un niño discapacitado. Yo tengo que ir por sus medicinas. Es tan tencionante . . . Y yo los miraba [agentes de ICE] en las gasolineras. No podías poner gasolina. No podías ir a comprar comida.”

Activities such as pumping gas in her car, picking up prescriptions, and driving her wheelchair-bound son to school or to doctors’ appointments became tensing, stressful, and fear-inducing for Amor: “Esas leyes son para temorizar a la gente.” These laws generate terror among the people, she adds. State

violence permeates the intimate (affect, embodiment) and interpersonal scales (networks). Amor elucidates that point when she states, “Donde quiera andaban [agentes de ICE]. En las iglesias. Una vez una amiga me dijo: “apenas estoy comprando en el H-E-B pero me dicen que ya vienen para aquí.” Y dejaban las cosas y se iban.” According to Amor, ICE has targeted places that are considered sanctuary, such as churches, to intimidate undocumented immigrants. ICE has also targeted grocery stores, forcing undocumented immigrants to leave their groceries behind and leave quickly. “Y eso era un estrés,” Amor further declares. State violence compromises everyday activities and collective behavior, and ultimately political engagement. In this context, going to churches or grocery stores become stressful and life-threatening activities. Under such dangerous contexts, nervous systems become aroused, chronically, which can lead to a constant activation of neurotransmitters and stress hormones such as adrenaline, dopamine, and cortisol, which can result in signi cant short and long-term health consequences. ICE terror can ultimately lead to chronic stress, dis/ease, and painful in ammation in racialized bodies, so the fear of being detained or deported is enough to weather undocumented immigrants. She adds, “El estrés lo tenemos constantemente y diariamente. Si salimos a comprar la leche . . . Nosotros no tenemos una vida tranquila.” The stress is constant and daily. We do not live a calm life.

ICE terrorizes and such violence can be traumatic. Martín-Baró (1988) de nes trauma as multilayered: psychic trauma is a wound that a dif cult experience leaves on a person; social trauma is a historic process that affects an entire community; and psychosocial trauma is a wound that is caused by the prolonged experience of a violent context, and it underlines that the wound will take on different forms depending on the peculiarity of the lived experience of a person. Based on the stories of Sabiduría and Amor one can argue that the psycho-social trauma they experience is interwoven with colonial trauma. Furthermore, DeGruy (2005) and Caldwell and Leighton (2018) de ne trauma as physical, emotional, psychological, or spiritual injuries caused by oppression and social injustice, leaving transgenerational imprints at the physiological and neurological levels. In other words, violence shows up in somatic geographies (Richards-Calathes, 2021), individually, collectively, and across lineages (Brave Heart, 1998). Therefore, ICE raids (as systematic abductions and family separation) must be viewed as enactments of state terror(ism) that have signi cant health and mental health consequences. If state terror aims to break down a person, then it is no surprise that Amor expresses feeling cansada, hostil, cualquier cosita me enoja porque no duermo bien —she is tired, hostile, anything triggers her anger because she does not sleep well.

We must remember that violence is met with resistance. Amor is active in her community despite being (rendered) undocumented. She participates in parent-teacher conferences, connects her mom friends and other parents with resources, encourages her friends and community members to advocate for

themselves, and at times she has directly and openly questioned the police for collaborating with ICE back when she felt safer to do so. However, navigating oppressive conditions is taxing. Amor narrates: “Yo en veces lloro. Cuando mis hijos se duermen yo lloro porque me siento sola, porque tengo que pasar por tantas cosas . . . Ellos tienen que estar fuertes y ellos tienen que seguir. Pero si ha sido difícil estar aquí. En veces he querido regresar [a México], pero no me puedo rendir porque atrás de mí vienen ellos. Yo tengo que estar fuerte para ellos. Los miro a ellos y digo: bueno mañana va ser otro día y ellos tienen que ir para su escuela.” Here my intention is to hold space for Amor’s tears because her body is wise and so are her sadness and her tears. Sometimes I cry when my children go to bed, she says. There are times when Amor feels alone and wonders why she has gone through so many stressful situations. Being in the United States as an undocumented single mother has been so challenging that sometimes she wants to go back to Mexico. But her children’s education is important to her. Despite all, she remains strong for her children and looks forward to brighter days. So, she stays. Amor is a loving and generous woman. We can learn from her wisdom/advice too: study, learn, and know your rights so you can ght back: “A muchas mamás les digo: ‘estudien el inglés.’ Pues tienes que aprender. A muchas mamás les hacen muchas cosas. Les digo: ‘estudia. Ve a la escuela.’ Muchas cosas no las aprendes si no sabes tus derechos.”

Decolonial Feminist Liberation Psychology and A Praxis of Critical Re exivity: Towards a Historic Responsibility to Abolition

Decolonial feminisms and liberation psychology might seemingly stand in opposition to another.11 However, it is important to highlight the powerful potential that lies at their intersection. On the one hand, decolonial feminisms are driven by a desire/goal for autonomy, self-determination, and liberation among historically oppressed peoples and, on the other hand, liberation psychology was popularized by a Spaniard Jesuit philosopher and psychologist. I use decolonial feminist liberation psychology to converse with and re ect back on the lived experiences of the women who shaped this article. Decolonial feminisms are ontologies (and cosmologies) that guide us in our praxes against colonialization, colonialism (Kab’nal 2010; Vergès 2021; Fanon,1963) and coloniality (Wynter 2003; Segato 2010; Lugones 2008; Quijano 2000); simultaneously, decolonial feminisms guide us in our personal and collective journeys toward decolonization, abolition, healing, and liberation. On the other hand, at its core, liberation psychology is an anti-imperialist project (Martín-Baró 1990; Martín-Baró 2014) that supports liberationist movements because it recognizes that in order to be psychologically healthy, we must rst dismantle psychosocial systems that keep us oppressed. Martín-Baró believed that liberation psychology must be concerned with 1) generating new liberatory psychological models and theories that respond to local needs and desires for freedom, 2) contextualizing and

articulating place-based/local psychosocial experiences and struggles in support of social movements, and 3) restoring psycho-social fabrics. And liberation psychology is also committed to participating in social protest and resistance like many Salvadoran psychology students did in the 1940s to the present date. That is, there is a radical and revolutionary history of psychology students who enacted and embodied liberation psychology about four decades before liberation psychology was popularized by Ignacio Martín-Baró. This history of revolutionary student protest and resistance is at the root of my commitment to an abolitionist and liberation psychology.

Hence, liberation psychology is a praxis.12 Martín-Baró states, “[T]o create a liberation psychology is not simply a theoretical task; rst and fundamentally it is a practical task.” As a liberation and abolitionist psychologist who is committed to decolonization, I acknowledge that psychology carries a wicked, violent past (Simango and Segalo 2021). Take, for example, the involvement of the American Psychological Association in the torture of political prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, a US black site in Cuba; psychology’s military development of moral studies which was concerned with population control and later gave birth to the elds of culture and personality psychology in the United States; and psychology’s key role in the manufacturing of psychological warfare after Rensis Likert proposed that bombs were not as effective at destroying enemies as strategies that were meant to break an enemy’s will (Summers, 2008). Such lethal proposition (known as the “psychological effort”) is evidenced in The CIA’s Nicaragua Manual: Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare (1985). In fact, I argue that the weaving decolonial feminisms and liberation psychology can subvert the colonial, militaristic and neoliberal logics that characterize the foundations of psychology and positivist and Eurocentric psychological research (Martín-Baró 1994; Danziger, 1997; Moscovici and Markova 2006; Winter and Barenbaum 2008; Green and Cautin 2017). This paper, then, solders a dialogue between decolonial feminisms and liberation psychology, the narrators’ voices, and my own analysis about their experiences all the while contouring these conversations in Spanish, English, and Spanglish.

The structural-intimate is not a dialectical relationship. The conversation between intersectionality (Crenshaw 1991), embodiment (Wynter 2003; King 2019; James 2016; Spillers 2005; McKittrick 2013), territoriality (Kab’nal 2010) and hemispheric approaches to analyzing bodies across (colonially constructed) borders (Speed 2019; Zaragocin 2020) allow us to examine multiple scales—from the ideological and structural to the most intimate experiences of affect and embodiment. Accompanied by liberation psychology, decolonial feminisms direct conversations about affective, somatic, and psycho-social experiences in ways that refuse to pathologize, psychologize, and essentialize historical, cultural, racial, intergenerational, and spiritual traumas. That is, a decolonial feminist liberation psychology exposes how domination that is rooted in colonialism, and enforced via state violence, generates a painful aftermath. As decolonial

feminists and liberation psychologists we must speak truth to power not just in our theory, but in our practice.

By focusing on Sabiduría’s and Amor’s affect and embodiment, I tended to the sequelae of being rendered undocumented while navigating a racist place like Austin. There is power in their stories. Their lived experiences expose the ways in which the United States enacts ideological, structural, social, and psychological violence on them. It is from their lived realities that an understanding about how state violence operates emerges. Such violence(s), relentlessly and aggressive accompany the women as they navigate a myriad of enactments of violence in their home countries, in the border/lands, and in the United States. Therefore, it is crucial to journey with women across borders and across relational and kin networks, not only in place.

As we journey with them, we see that state violence ripples across. Both narrators reported having been signi cantly impacted by the recent ICE raids and by the detention and deportation of either a signi cant other or community members. As we saw with Sabiduría, she felt a sense of emotional, moral, and economic loss after ICE detained and deported her ex-boyfriend. This reminds us that economic impact is always gendered, and gendered impacts are always racialized. Similarly, Amor reported feeling tense, stressed, and insecure while driving and shopping for food. The fear of being detained and deported is constant.

ICE raids, detentions, and deportations are enactments of psychological violence. State violence scholars Cecilia Menjívar and Nestor Rodríguez ask, “What is the purpose of the most brutal tortures? Are they intended only to establish a generalized climate of fear? Are they meant to keep in place a docile workforce with low wages to bene t the wealthy and multinational corporations? Are they to eliminate the opposition? … To set an example?” (2005, 16). We can ask the same questions about ICE. In fact, I argue that ICE is a repressive organization. The psychological torture that is enacted on racialized people who have been rendered undocumented is intentional. Fear and pain, as in many contexts of warfare and state violence, are politicized/political and essential to keeping people alienated from their own bodies, stressed out, and in a perpetual state of susto. The affective embodiment of torture and the sequelae of psychological violence are necessary to fortify the logics or (il)legality/dehumanization. Thus, this paper engages with a decolonial feminist analysis to expose psychological violence as an expression of white supremacist domination.

Analyzing narratives by researchers who are survivors of state violence introduces complex dynamics of critical re exivity for the researcher and for the readers. Those of us who have been forced to endure, survive, or escape conditions of state violence and who have had the opportunity to tell our testimonies or write about them will tell you that this work is far from easy. Witnessing testimonies of interpersonal, cultural, and structural violence is heartbreaking and retriggering. Their stories stayed with me. Throughout this process, I have

felt indignation, anger, grief, rage, survivor’s guilt, powerlessness, and sadness. My body metabolized these emotions into in ammation and aches which triggered a series of even more complex psycho-emotional and physiological experiences (Beltrán Girón 2021). These emotions, however, ignite within me a sense of responsibility to act. I treat my emotions as powerful guides that re-direct me to a radical praxis and attune me to my interconnectivity with the cosmos, the land, human relatives, non-human relatives, spirits and ancestors, and my own self—from the affective and the spiritual to the cellular and quantum particles that make up my (meta)physical body. From this sacred place, I can hear my ancestors’ calls for truth, justice, and liberation.

Decolonial feminisms remind us that the ght for liberation is a life-long commitment. As a migration justice activist and an anti-imperialist organizer this commitment is clear to me. Those of us who have (or have not or have yet to) come into contact with testimonies of state violence have a social responsibility to protest, subvert, and ultimately abolish/destroy repressive institutions. This paper stands on the shoulders of abolitionist struggles that ght to end the prison- and military-industrial complexes. ICE operates at the nexus of both. Social scientists have an ethical responsibility to amplify and stand in solidarity with abolitionist agendas as well as to contribute to and join abolitionist struggles. ICE was created less than two decades ago, and though the white supremacist logics of dehumanization have existed long before ICE was formed, its elimination can be achieved.13

This article is a labor of love because love is sacred and what is sacred cannot be destroyed.

Joanna Beltrán Girón M.A., M.Phil. Ph.D. (c) (she/they) is an organizer, educator, researcher, consultant, and medicine worker interested in the intergenerational transmission of trauma and in collective healing/medicine. They accompany survivors of colonial, state, and interpersonal violence in their ght for truth and justice. Her scholarship and healing work draws from liberation and abolition psychology, decolonial feminisms, spirituality, herbalism, metaphysics, quantum theory, science ction, cyberfeminisms, and ancestral healing. Joanna is certi ed in Reiki, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), and Interactive Technology and Pedagogy.

Notes

1. Shannon Speed (2019) reminds us that narrators carry embodied experience which “presents a source of knowledge not bound by hegemonic ideological frames” (10).

2. Alan Pelaez Lopez, an Afroindigenous poet from Oaxaca, México, sheds light on the white supremacist heteropatriarchal and anti-Black racist colonial legacies behind the term “Latinx.” While the original study did not critique the term “Latinx,” now

that I have learned more about the ways in which settler violence permeates cultural, racial, and ethnic identities and as I re ect about my own (former) self-identi cation as Latina and later as Latinx, I am split between honoring the narrators’ self-identi cation with Latinidad and the wounds that emerge from it and that are perpetuated by it.

3. In 2003, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) was dissolved and reformulated as Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Though the INS had operated since 1933, ICE is the latest settler formulation and technology of terror that enforces crimmigration.

4. As a trained qualitative interviewer, I practiced mindful ethics (González-López 2011) during the interviews which allowed me to center the narrators’ affect, emotions, and embodiment during the interviews. Grounded in Buddhist practice, GonzálezLópez (2011) de nes mindful ethics as a “paradigm with conceptual foundations in mindful inquiry and mindfulness, grounded theory, and ethically important moments and ethics in practice” (451) that allows researchers to ground their work on process, allowing for an appreciation of the “here and now” when unexpected ethical concerns arise during the eldwork.

5. While femicide refers to the systematic killing of women, feminicide is a political term. Feminicide holds responsible not only the male perpetrators but also the state and judicial structures that normalize misogyny, or hatred toward girls and women (Lagarde y de los Ríos, 2005) and cuerpos feminizados (Segato 2010).

6. I use the term “women” to refer to anyone who self-identi es as a woman.

7. Speed (2019) stresses that “vulnerability is not a condition of the women themselves, but rather a structural condition . . . a condition consciously created through the settler-colonial process, and, though functioning differently across space and time, consistently deploys racial and gender ideologies to manage the ongoing business of settler occupation” (5).

8. The term “Global South” has been contested because the notion of the “south” is positioned as a margin away from a given (dominant) periphery: the global North. Decolonial feminists problematize the colonial legacies in geographies/place (McKittrick, 2021) and hegemonic topographies (Faria 2017). Therefore, I also use the term "Global Majority" to de-center Western/Eurocentric/Hegemonic geographies.

9. In the same article, Aron writes a footnote about anticipatory fear as an experience that can emerge from planned insecurity. Planned insecurity was a technique of psychological warfare that was perfectioned in nazi Germany.

10. On February 6, 2020, ICE tased, pepper sprayed, and consequently kidnapped Gaspar Avendaño Hernández at his front yard in Brooklyn as he was leaving for work. Avedaño Hernandez was also shot in the face by ICE. On February 8, 2020, I participated in a rally where relatives, organizers, activists, and lawyers demanded the city, starting with NY State Attorney General Tish James, to investigate the shooting. At the rally, in solidarity with Gaspar and his family and community, a Black organizer and a Jewish activist each gave a brief speech in response to the arrest and shooting. Despite their historical and racial differences, they both forwarded an analysis that merits highlighting: for the Black organizer, ICE reminds him of the the ku klux klan; and for the Jewish organizer, ICE reminds her of the gestapo. The activists also articulated that the kkk and gestapo relied on disappearances/kidnappings/abductions to enact terror on Black people and Jews, similar to how ICE now relies on forced detentions and deportations to enact fear and terror on undocumented immigrants.

11. The contradiction I want to highlight is this: liberation psychology was popularized by Ignacio Martín-Baró, or “Nacho” for short. Nacho’s training as a liberation theologian had a big in uence in his articulations of the role of the Catholic church amidst a US-backed military repression against social movements in El Salvador. Later on, based on his political positionality as a liberation theologian, he proposed that the role of psychology and psychologists in the face of warfare is to stand in solidarity with the oppressed popular movements. As political as liberation theology was at the time and continues to be, it is imperative to also highlight the violent legacy of Catholicism and the Catholic church. Catholicism is a religion and spiritual belief/system that was violently imposed on the original peoples in what is known as “the Americas” and around the world. So, I often grapple with the questions: can liberation psychology (in the way that was articulated by Martín-Baró) contribute to liberation struggles? And if so, how? And how has liberation psychology matured over time as it is informed by more recent global and local social liberationist movements?

12. Brazilian educator and philosopher, Paulo Freire (1970), de nes praxis as a commitment to action-re ection-action in the transformation of oppressive and exploitative conditions.

13. A different world is possible; or in the spirit of the Zapatistas: un mundo donde muchos mundos quepan es posible.

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