Cultural Outing- Dr. Marquez

I too had the privilege to attend Dr. Marquez’ talk, “Latinos as the Living Dead: The Necropolitics of Immigration.” He began by raising awareness of just how many people have been seeping through our borders in the last few decades, with the economic crisis of 2008 being the only factor that has really halted immigration, and even that only briefly.  He discussed the simultaneous opening of the border for trade and commerce (NAFTA) with the closing of the border to people. But I was most intrigued by his ideas on the role of mythology in transforming Latinos into serious threats in the minds of Americans.

He broke down these myths into three meta-rules, as he called them. First, was the idea that the US manifests crises of sovereignty in order to establish authority. This is an accusation that has been made over and over. Marquez suggests that American people have bought into these created “catastrophes” and fallen right into our government’s trap as we rely on them to save us. His second rule was that US nationalism is being regenerated through state-sanctioned violence, such as what we’re seeing along the US-Mexico border with the guards essentially authorized to kill anyone who pisses them off.  The use of force is completely disproportionate to the threat. Finally, Marquez points to the testimonies of victims who clearly recognize what is happening to them. They are not stupid. The Latinos understand what’s going on and have created their own subjectivity/consciousness in response.

I was really fascinated by the role of myth in this whole controversy. We perpetuate clever nomenclatures, such as the “war on crime” or the “war on gangs” or the “war on drugs” to justify doing unthinkable violence towards anyone who might somehow fall under those categories. The government makes the border about hot-button issues like the environment rather than the lives that are being lost. Marquez hit it straight on the head when he said, “We care more about protecting rare species than human lives”.

This lecture had a great deal to do with the many intricate and complex layers surrounding this whole issue that we’ve been unpacking in class. Marquez referred to the borderlands as “Deathworld”; an appropriate nickname that I think a lot of our Chicano artists (Margolles, Moraga) would also adopt.  At the end, Marquez brought sexuality into the conversation. He mentioned that it has been the mothers that are pushed to the forefront of these issues. The phrase he’s heard over and over again: “I want to know the name of the guy who shot my son.” The namelessness of the perpetrators is difficult to combat; these guards are merely acting on behalf of our country. This sense of anonymity has often been addressed or challenged in the artistic works we’ve examined. Margolles expresses the anonymity in death, the bodies on top of bodies, completely separate from their identities other than that which makes them the enemy. I think of Asco’s work, tagging their names on the museum; fighting this spirit of exclusion, desperate to be heard. Marquez brought many of these seemingly disparate pieces together in a very compelling, unified way that helped me to understand how all of these emotions, reactions, and lies are tied up in the same issue.