The Violence Against Women Act

The Battered Immigrant Women Protection Act, part of the Violence against Women Act (VAWA) (1994, 2000, 2005, and 2013), shelters from deportation undocumented victims of domestic violence and immigrant women with conditional status. Regarding the former, the 2000 bill created the U Visa, available to undocumented women who have suffered domestic violence or other crimes and are willing to provide information that could contribute to their investigation (Tacher et al. Reference Tacher, Kumar and Orloff2014).^{Footnote 8} Domestic violence, along with other gendered forms of victimization such as sexual assault and human trafficking, makes up three quarters of yearly U Visa petitions (Caplan-Bricker Reference Caplan-Bricker2017). Regarding the latter (women whose status is dependent on family members who are legal permanent residents or citizens), the 2005 bill establishes a right to self-petition. This allows partners, elderly family members, and parents of children abused by US citizens or permanent residents to sidestep the dependent petition process and apply confidentially and independently for status (Preda et al. Reference Preda, Olavarria, Kaguyutan and Carra2013).

When VAWA is approached through the lens of the economy of violence, connections between humanitarianism and violence emerge that are not simply trivial, i.e., in the sense that humanitarianism is devoted to protect subjects who are victims of violence.^{Footnote 9} In the contemporary US immigration regime, humanitarianism contributes to the mythical character of violence by occluding the productive role of violence in making and preserving law. In particular, humanitarianism enables violence in three ways. First, humanitarian measures identify certain groups as vulnerable/victims and others—by opposition—as rightly targeted by the violence of immigration enforcement. Second, humanitarianism redraws the chains of responsibility that connect citizens to migrants, superimposing a relationship of benevolence over (a) the routine and intended character of enforcement violence, and (b) the darker system of racial regulation of movement and labor to which immigration law contributes. Third, by condemning gendered violence in the private realm, humanitarianism disavows the violence encountered by women in state-sanctioned spaces, further reinforcing the myth of the rule of law untarnished by violence. All three mechanisms sustain mythical violence by disavowing how violence props up and makes new law that sustains the idea of the United States as a country of just laws and that of the migrant as a law-breaker rightfully expelled, again enabling violence.

The Humanitarian Game of Oppositions

The game of oppositions operates in VAWA by singling out victims of domestic violence as deserving protection, as noted earlier, but also played a role in the justification of the Obama administration’s selective relief from deportation. Despite the fact that about half of deported individuals in his administration faced no criminal charges, or only minor charges (Young Reference Young2017), the administration insisted that its focus was on deporting dangerous criminals, which was accompanied by humanitarian signaling. In a speech announcing that he would de-prioritize the targeting of certain groups in November of 2014, for example, President Obama claimed that his administration would focus on deporting:

These oppositions are at the core of the humanitarian logic, which distinguishes the violence necessary to go after felons, criminals, and gang members from the vulnerable groups whose protection denies the wrongness of such violence and absolves the state from responsibility. The logic of humanitarian oppositions is also central to understanding the narrow confines of the immigration debate in the 2016 presidential elections, which focused strongly on immigration. Although there is little doubt that the campaign of President Trump relied explicitly on racialized figures of the criminal and the terrorist to support a restrictive agenda, it is the Democrats’ response that is theoretically more interesting.

The Clinton campaign did not explicitly rely on oppositions, but it did have a consistent humanitarian tone. In particular, a campaign ad featured footage from a town hall meeting in Nevada in which Hillary Clinton reassured Karla Ortiz, an 11-year-old girl who feared her undocumented parents would be deported (Foley Reference Foley2016). Ortiz, the daughter of Guatemalan undocumented parents, repeated her plea on behalf of her parents as a speaker at the Democratic National Convention (Mai-Duc Reference Mai-Duc2016; Ross Reference Ross2016). By featuring a child to make its case, the campaign refused to establish linkages (political or otherwise) with actual undocumented immigrants, and shaped the political message to be one of comfort and reassurance by the adult Clinton toward the child.

This focus on children echoes the landmark immigration action taken by the Obama administration, DACA—suspended in September 2017 and reinstated by a federal judge in January 2018—which defers deportation for undocumented individuals who came to the United States as children. Although the activism around this order (and around VAWA) is heterogeneous and would warrant lengthy analyses beyond the reach of this article, the narrative offered by public officials defending this measure argued that children—having been brought to the United States by their parents—did not willingly break the law. Again, the notion of victimhood figures prominently in the justification, and the focus on children reasserts the myth of rightful exclusion of their parents, adult lawbreakers, and their violent targeting by the enforcement regime. Moreover, the order defers deportation; it requires extensive background checks and fees, and renewal every two years. The beneficiaries themselves become the target of surveillance, and their information (as well as that of their undocumented parents) is, at the time of writing, available to the Trump administration, which suspended the protections. This administration, in turn, is likely to utilize it to preserve and remake the law by violently interrupting these lives through detention and deportation. Yet, the power of humanitarian discourse is such that even in the context of the open display of violence in immigration law that characterizes this administration, it has had to respond—however cosmetically—to humanitarian backlashes. This was the case following the publicity of family separations and after deportation deferrals for those receiving lifesaving medical treatment or their families were suspended (Campisi Reference Campisi2019). Vis-à-vis Benjamin’s economy of violence, organizing opposition to immigration enforcement through humanitarianism obscures that violence—through immigration enforcement as well as non-immigration related techniques—is the normative way of regulating populations of brown, low-skilled workers.

Humanitarianism and Responsibility

A second way in which humanitarianism protects law from being unveiled as made and preserved through violence is by superimposing relations of benevolence over relations of responsibility. This superimposition is necessary because of the increased visibility of the routine violence of the regime of immigration enforcement at time of writing Humanitarian calculations and calibrations are required to prevent excessive violence from revealing that the state’s violent regulation of racialized populations is a historical norm and serves other purposes, including that of facilitating profit. The routine character of violence materializes in the vast regime of enforcement, which has removed over 2.8 million migrants from the interior since 9/11 and detains hundreds of thousands of migrants every year. In addition to this violence, the state sanctions particular forms of vulnerability for women, the same vulnerabilities that in fact gave rise to the VAWA protections described above. On the one hand, the vulnerability of foreign spouses was introduced by the Immigration Marriage Fraud Amendments of 1986, which established a “two-year conditional permanent residence status for foreign national spouses and children who obtained permanent residence through… marriage… with a US Citizen or [Legal Permanent Resident]” (Anderson Reference Anderson1993; Kandel Reference Kandel2012). On the other hand, the vulnerability of undocumented migrants to domestic and other forms of violence is associated with the growing involvement of local law enforcement in immigration policing, which makes contacts with the authorities risky for migrants.

Thus, the U Visa and self-petition, by positioning the state as protector, obscure the fact that the state itself created those vulnerabilities. Moreover, humanitarianism requires violence to have taken place, for it is the badge that will warrant protection. This is clear in the definition of the self-petitioner in a 2007 memorandum:

The humanitarian focus on assisting those already victimized (in contrast to addressing the sources of their victimization) echoes Beth Richie’s distinction between social justice movements and the predominant approach of state agencies on the question of domestic violence more generally. Although the former look at the root causes of domestic violence, the latter support individual women who have been harmed (Richie Reference Richie2012, 67, 85–6), and disavow involvement in the production of vulnerability and their ability to undo it.

Elsewhere in the memorandum mentioned earlier, the collaboration between abusers and ICE is problematized and officers are required to obtain independent verification of the abuser’s accusations regarding status’ violations. However, officers are still encouraged to consider abusers’ accusations, and—if applicable—make “adverse determination of admissibility or deportability” (Torres Reference Torres2007). In this case, the abusive character of immigration enforcement emerges clearly: their actions (detention and deportation) underlie threats and constitute punishment for a spouse that abusers wish to harm. The tone changes in a 2011 memorandum reminding ICE officers “[t]o exercise all appropriate discretion on a case-by-case basis when making detention and enforcement decisions in the cases of victims of crime, witnesses to crime, and individuals pursuing legitimate civil rights complaints” (Morton Reference Morton2011). This memorandum speaks of perceived “excessive violence” on the ground but does not change that the state produces the vulnerability.^{Footnote 10} and that only suffering violence exempts migrants from lack of status and qualifies them for relief, though in no way this qualification means immediate protection.^{Footnote 11} This facetiousness is sometimes at play in the very same rule, like the 2005 VAWA reauthorization that both expanded access to work permits for victims of violence by a “foreign worker-spouse” and integrated local law enforcement with federal immigration enforcement, thus empowering the former to join actions targeting immigrants (Sampaio Reference Sampaio2015, 67–8).

Categories of Violence and Their Relation to Law

In addition to enforcement violence and the creation of vulnerable private spaces, immigration enforcement engages violently with women directly. Practices include sexual harassment and abuse by ICE officers, family detention, family separation, detention of pregnant women, poor detention conditions, and deportations to border towns at night (Speri Reference Ackerly2018; Cho and Shah Reference Cho and Shah2016; ICE 2017; Riva Reference Riva2017; Woodruff Reference Woodruff2018). In this context, the “protection” of Latina migrants through VAWA becomes paradoxical: why does the state perpetrate violence against these women while protecting a sub-set of them from domestic violence? This is particularly puzzling because the empirical ends of the state—to produce vulnerable immigrant subjects through its apparatus of enforcement—seem continuous with the fear and violence that characterize certain intimate relationships.

Here, Benjamin’s framework helps differentiate types of violence and their role vis-à-vis law. The difference between the violence of domestic partners and that sanctioned by the state is their contrasting position vis-à-vis mythologies of law and understandings of responsibility outlined earlier. Women’s victimization by the state—although often unacknowledged—preserves the law because, by punishing brown women, the state confirms their mythical status as threatening lawbreakers and a potential drain on welfare resources (Cisneros Reference Cisneros2013; Lugo-Lugo and Bloodsworth-Lugo Reference Lugo-Lugo and Bloodsworth-Lugo2014; Valdez Reference Valdez2016), and reasserts the United States as a country of laws. By contrast, domestic violence affecting women in US territory puts in question the central narrative of the rule of law that disavows nonauthorized violence—particularly gendered violence—and marks it as foreign. Hence, domestic violence has the potential to endanger “the law itself” (in Benjamin’s terms) by questioning US exceptionalism and thus the legitimacy of the violence performed in its name. To this, the state responds by punishing the perpetrator and protecting the victim.

The Inadequacy of Humanitarianism

Latina/o Studies has studied humanitarianism discourses and policy practices that highlight “family,” “motherhood,” and the care of children, like the “Alternatives to Detention” (ATD) program. Andrea Gómez Cervantes and coauthors argue that these measures—which include releasing women with ankle monitors instead of bond, and “intensive supervision appearance programs”—contribute to the ongoing criminalization of immigrant women (Reference Gómez Cervantes, Menjívar and Staples2017, 282–3). They note that although ATD measures are championed as humanitarian alternatives, the treatment of women and their children in these programs is indistinguishable from practices proper of the criminal justice system (Reference Gómez Cervantes, Menjívar and Staples2017, 271). Anna Sampaio similarly criticizes the 2005 bill’s blurring of the boundaries between anti-violence and securitization (Reference Sampaio2015, 67–8). Vis-à-vis these critiques, it is important to highlight that a Benjaminian approach takes the realization that humanitarian tactics within the immigration regime are indistinguishable from criminalization as the starting point, rather than the goal, of a critique of violence. Unless this is the case, condemning the conflation between humanitarianism and criminality/security risks falling into the dynamic of oppositions described above, this time separating migrants from actual criminals or terrorists and the techniques the latter endure from techniques appropriate for civil immigration law. Here, protecting migrants from the violent reach of the state further mythologizes the violence targeted at criminals.^{Footnote 12} Instead, I take these convergences as an indication of the common ways in which violence underpins the lawful regulation of brown and black bodies in realms of immigration, criminal justice, and labor; violence that deserves a more radical critique, which I conduct in the next section.

Old Fashioned Exploitation

A history of farmworkers’ activism would merit volumes and I cannot do it justice here. Scholars have documented farm laborers’ organizing over the past century, including the wave of strikes during the Great Depression, particularly after—and despite of—the exclusion of the sector from collective bargaining rights granted by the National Industrial Recovery Act during the New Deal (Hahamovitch Reference Hahamovitch1997, 138–9). Perhaps the best-known case of Latina/o farmworker organizing is the United Farm Workers (UFW), led by Cesar Chávez and Dolores Huerta, which in the early 1970s represented “almost all of those who picked grapes from California’s vines and half of those who picked lettuce” (Pawel Reference Pawel2014, 2). As US farmworkers organized, and farmworkers’ unions brought questions of compensation and working conditions to public attention, they contended with growers’ efforts to legally and illegally curtail their progress. Among other actions, growers pressured state and federal governments to outlaw union practices, including boycotts and communications with workers about job prospects; to prevent the federal government from transporting farm workers without growers’ permission and from setting wages; and to encourage labor imports through guest worker programs to prevent shortages and maintain low wages (Valdés Reference Valdés2011, 173–4; Hahamovitch Reference Hahamovitch2011; Pawel Reference Pawel2014, 239). Unions faced the limited political and electoral clout inherent in mobilizing farmworkers, many of them seasonal workers or noncitizens. Moreover, farmworkers’ activism systematically met with organized violence by growers, vigilantes, and law enforcement (Hahamovitch Reference Hahamovitch1997, 140; Valdés Reference Valdés2011, 171). In other words, US agricultural labor readily shows how violence performed by lawmaking and law-preserving police, immigration enforcement, and vigilantes mandates a particular division of labor, well-being, and resources along racial lines.

This is the historical context in which the CIW started organizing farmworkers in Florida. Founded by Greg Asbed, Lucas Benitez, and Laura Germino in 1993, the Coalition organized community-wide work stoppages and public pressure campaigns against Florida tomato growers, including a month-long hunger strike in 1998, and a 234-mile march to Orlando in 2000. As a result, the CIW negotiated an industry-wide raise of 13–25%, which brought the tomato-picking price back to pre-1980 levels (CIW n.d.-a). After that first triumph, the CIW founded the Fair Food Program, which, rather than targeting growers, focused on food service, fast food, and groceries corporations, who concentrate buying power and determine tomato prices and, as a consequence, farmworkers’ wages (Greenhouse Reference Greenhouse2014). After a four-year boycott, in 2005 Taco Bell became the first corporation to sign a “Fair Food Code of Conduct,” requiring growers who supplied them to follow standards beyond state or federal law requirements (Burkhalter Reference Burkhalter2012; CIW n.d.-a; Greenhouse Reference Greenhouse2014). These standards—which are audited by workers’ representatives—include an extra penny per pound of tomato picked, mandatory shade for breaks, clocking of transportation and wait, a health and safety committee with workers’ representatives, and a 24-hour complaints hotline. The program also mandated raises (of between 20 and 35%), training sessions for growers’ staff, and the establishment of a Fair Food Standards Council, funded by third parties and led by a former New York State judge (Fair Food Standards and Council 2018; Greenhouse Reference Greenhouse2014). The Fair Food Program today covers 90% of Florida’s tomato growers, which in turn supply 90% of winter tomatoes to the United States (Greenhouse Reference Greenhouse2014). Although scholars have identified the Coalition as a promising movement within social justice food activism and transnationalism (Allen Reference Allen2008; Drainville Reference Drainville2008; Holt Giménez and Shattuck Reference Holt Giménez and Shattuck2011), I find the juxtaposition of its activism with Benjamin’s attention to labor and its ability to stage a real state of exception to be most productive. This juxtaposition foregrounds how a worker grass roots movement with a migrant base that refuses engagement on the terms set by the immigration debate can put forward a radical historical critique of both labor exploitation and the regime of immigration enforcement.

The Coalition’s successes in Florida, and its expansion to states where tomatoes are harvested during Florida’s off season, took place despite opposition and through campaigns that borrowed from the historical activism of the United Farm Workers,^{Footnote 13} including marches, boycotts, and hunger strikes, but shifted the target of the campaigns from growers to corporations. At the time of writing Aramark, Bon Apétit, Burger King, Chiplotle, Compass Group, McDonalds, Taco Bell, Trader Joe’s, Sodexo, Stop & Shop Giant, Subway, Walmart, and Wholefoods are signatories of the Fair Food Program (CIW n.d.-b). Conspicuously absent from this list is Wendy’s, the fourth largest fast food company and the target of the CIW’s ongoing boycott, which I analyze next.

The Coalition launched the campaign against Wendy’s in January of 2013 after letters sent over a span of five years inviting them to join the program went unanswered. This campaign enlists interfaith allies and student activists to pressure Wendy’s to join the program by making public the exploitative labor conditions in the company’s supply chain (CIW 2013d, 2014, 2016, 2017c, 2017d). The campaign was launched with a signature logo that subverted Wendy’s logo, “Quality is our Recipe” and “Old Fashioned Hamburgers,” to read instead “Inequality is our Recipe” and “Old Fashioned Exploitation” (CIW 2013b).

Thus, from the start, the boycott provided a conception of history focused on the violent labor exploitation of black and brown groups as the norm of market capitalism in the United States to contest it. It connected its struggle with the long tradition of struggle against racial regimes of labor that shaped the US polity, thus putting forward a historical constellation that, in Benjamin’s terms, is “filled with the presence of the now [Jetztzeit]” (TPH, 261–3). This constellation, established between resonant historical events and the present, stages a real state of exception, i.e., it endangers the “law itself” by illuminating the routine character of violence that has historically targeted vulnerable groups and continues to underwrite the law.

CIW actions highlighting violence disrupt the image that brands establish to distance themselves from the violence that makes their business profitable. For example, in June of 2013, the CIW commented on Wendy’s new branding initiative, which would “build a stronger ‘emotional connection’” to its customers, by suggesting that they also “clean up some unfinished business with farmworkers in Florida” (2013c). This disruption of the economy of affect of consumer capitalism—pursued also through their activism on college campuses around the country—threatens the value of Wendy’s brand by connecting it to exploitation. Moreover, labor exploitation is revealed as indebted to asymmetric power among growers and mass retailers in the food supply chain, despite the efforts of the latter to disavow their current and historical dependence on the violent racial regulation of labor and mobility that grounds US capitalism.

When Wendy’s responded, it pointed to their reliance of an “independent, nonprofit purchasing cooperative,” as evidence that they do not need a code of conduct. The CIW quickly remarked that the goal of the cooperative is to pool buyers to achieve lower produce prices (2013a, 2013f). Furthermore, when Wendy’s announced their auditing scheme (SA8000 by Social Responsibility International), the CIW retorted that such programs lack independent enforcement and that similar voluntary audit programs had certified factories in Bangladesh and Pakistan shortly before fatal fires occurred (2018b). They also responded to Wendy’s move to purchase tomatoes from greenhouses by highlighting that greenhouses do not prevent poor working conditions and abuse (2018b). Wendy’s continuous adjustments both react to CIW demands and dodge commitment, illustrating the effectiveness of CIW tactics in exposing violence and threatening the lawful exploitation in the fields.

Two further exchanges show that the threatening character of CIW activism lies in its ability to expose the historically normative and racially targeted character of violence. First, in an early public statement, Wendy’s characterized the CIW as “un-American,” a strategy Burger King also took before signing the Code of Conduct, and an effort to signal the majority immigrant character of the activists. Wendy’s argued “it’s inappropriate to demand that one company pay another company’s employees. America doesn’t work that way” (CIW 2013e). Although this claim is inexact—since the extra payment required by the program is made by growers—it was nonetheless countered by the CIW:

Although the statement ends on a hopeful note, it opens by highlighting that the exploitation and degradation of racialized farmworkers is inherently “American,” pushing against Wendy’s denigration of foreignness by uncovering the dark side of “home.” Moreover, Wendy’s press release reveals what it wants to hide: they work within a market structure that enables exploitation, by shifting workers to workplaces reliant on sales to corporate buyers. These “fissured workplaces” result in unequal bargaining relationships that produce wage stagnation and low compliance with labor standards downstream, even if corporations are not direct employers (Weil Reference Weil2011; Wilmers Reference Wilmers2018). This violence is what Onur Ulas Ince (Reference InceForthcoming, 18) conceptualizes as “capital-preserving violence” and locates in the institutionalized practices of the market, where he argues that worker’s dependence on capital and workplace’s despotism supplants “extra-economic coercion.” Yet, as I show, extra-economic coercion should not be relegated so easily to the past, because immigration enforcement and other forms of policing remain in sectors with high proportion of immigrant workers or brown and black workers, such as agriculture, meat-packing, or prison labor. The Coalition’s activism is attuned to this vulnerability, i.e., the inherent weakness of labor in markets with unlimited labor supply—the conditions that, for Gourevitch, justify workers resorting to coercion (Reference Gourevitch2018, 906)—and sidesteps this problem by boycotting corporations, relocating the bargaining to the level of mass buyers.^{Footnote 14} By targeting corporate produce buyers and committing them to buying only from growers with a code of conduct, the CIW radically changes this equation: it does not matter how much you can exploit workers if, as a grower, you cannot secure buyers for your produce. The unsettling of the market structures that construct sectors of exploited labor at the bottom of the agricultural chain may be what Wendy’s most actively resists, as clumsily revealed in their assessment that “America doesn’t work that way.”

A second exchange similarly led to a disruptive moment of historically imbued connection. In March of 2018, a women-led march to Wendy’s Manhattan headquarters, following a five-day fast, demanded relocating their tomato sourcing to growers abiding by strict protections against sexual harassment. This action was part of the “Harvest without Violence Campaign,” launched in 2017, which asks for an end to “sexual violence in Wendy’s supply chain” (2017a, 2017e). Wendy’s spokesperson Heidi Schauer responded:

This intervention, immediately countered by #MeToo movement leaders like Alyssa Milano and Eve Ensler (CIW 2018a), brought to the surface the racialized character of sexual violence. In particular, it exposed the racially segmented character of women’s oppression and the historical inability of women of color to exit sexualizing narratives of availability that prevent their abuse from being categorized as an offense. The response of the leader of the march, Silvia Perez, was to condemn the suggestion that “farmworker women do not belong in the #MeToo movement” (CIW 2018c). This sentiment was echoed in social media, where actress Caitriona Balfe ironically captured the racialized exclusion by asking “How dare these workers!!! @Wendy’s—continue your exploitation!!!!” (CIW 2018c). The CIW leadership took this opportunity to highlight the higher rates of sexual harassment among farmworker women and their “decades-long fight to end sexual violence in the fields, which predates the momentum of the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements” (2018a). Their denunciation of the attack as “wildly disrespectful” and “disgraceful” condemned, but also highlighted, the relative vulnerability that racialized and sexualized women farmworkers face, both in the fields, and in the public sphere (2018a). Wendy’s efforts to dismiss the Coalition with racialized claims that put in doubt their belonging were astutely interpreted by Nely Rodriguez, a CIW leader, who—at a roundtable at Ohio State University in 2018—tied Wendy’s reluctance to come to the table to its arrogance and fear of responsibility, i.e., its refusal to be subjected to an enforceable code of conduct and, in particular, one established and administered by immigrant workers.

CIW: Violence, History, and Refusal of Humanitarianism

The CIW works actively against the humanitarian dynamics specified earlier. First, rather than requesting protection for victims that, by extension, showcases the rightfulness of law, the CIW’s actions target and make visible the connection between violence (in the form of labor exploitation and sexual harassment), on the one hand, and law-abiding corporate actors like Wendy’s and its consumers. Notably, although both humanitarianism and CIW activism target sexual violence, the former makes the problem one of private actions to be addressed via criminal justice, while the latter ties it to relations of capitalist exploitation that need to be checked and social norms that need to be changed through staff and workers’ education.^{Footnote 15} Second, the CIW illuminates, rather than covers up, violence in the fields and remarks on its systemic character. Beyond the actions mentioned, the CIW regularly marches to Wendy’s headquarters in Dublin (OH), and Palm Beach (FL), where Wendy’s chairman Nelson Peltz vacations (CIW 2017a, 2017b, 2017e). These actions bring the reality of exploited labor to places and actors that disavow the violence that underlies their projects, e.g., (a) hedge funds populated by management and investment consultants who objectify workers as figures in business plans, (b) a well-to-do suburb in Central Ohio, and (c) a luxurious resort town that—while geographically proximate and probably buying local—depends on a willful estrangement from the labor conditions in nearby fields, where mythical violence does its work. Thus, the CIW highlights the entwined character of wealth and state-sanctioned racial exploitation and division of labor. By threatening the image and exposing the violence upon which corporations’ profits rely, the Coalition extracts concessions not owed to them by law. It is in this sense that CIW activism resembles Benjamin’s general strike,^{Footnote 16} even if the Coalition does not aim for a sweeping overthrow of the legal system. CIW’s boycotts, public shaming, and occupation of public spaces highlight the legality of labor exploitation of black and brown workers in the fields in ways that exceed mere demands of adjusting labor conditions. This excess threatens the mythical economy of violence that sustains law and corporate profit.

Third, the CIW rejects the game of oppositions. Rather than defining themselves against narratives of illegality and criminalization that dominate public debate, the Coalition displaces this claim by focusing on labor exploitation, hence practicing other features of the general strike: omission and extortion. Notably, the CIW does not organize around the immigration background of its workers—which, if representative of sector demographics, should be majority migrant and 50–70% undocumented (Farmworker Justice 2014, 1; Hernandez, Gabbard, and Carroll Reference Hernandez, Gabbard and Carroll2016, i)—and does not engage in immigration-related advocacy.^{Footnote 17} By disowning the immigration question, the CIW does violence to punitive immigration laws that reinforce other legal processes to make the fields violent spaces. In this way, the CIW imperils the project of white domination jointly sustained by labor and migration laws. Paradoxically, by refusing engagement, focusing on the violence in the fields, and publicly shaming corporations, the CIW illuminates that contemporary immigration law and enforcement’s efforts to erase them and others from the public (except as victims or criminals) are political moves to sustain violent arrangements. Against this, CIW activism reveals the complicity of law and violent policing in sustaining exploitation and demystifies violence, that is, it reveals exploitation as historically normative and made possible by the state, growers, and corporations.

The move beyond immigration could be resisted by arguing that the CIW should organize against both labor exploitation and immigration enforcement; echoing strategic advocacy of migrant movements that are internally critical of immigration reform. Yet, if the CIW were to engage in immigration advocacy, demands for membership of an existing polity would relativize its critique of the polity’s racialized distribution of well-being, punishment, and surveillance along racial lines. Rather than requesting inclusion in such a polity, the CIW demands a radical transformation of US racial capitalism that also addresses market sources of vulnerability of undocumented workers. The compromises of advocating for immigration reform are particularly salient in terms of the philosophy of history this narrative contains. Advocacy against enforcement or for membership leaves behind history that does not fit squarely with a progressive narrative of inclusion of deserving groups (TPH, 255, 259). In this move, images of “enslaved ancestors” are replaced by those of “liberated grandchildren” (TPH, 260, 262, 263), muting configurations full of disruptive tensions, like the reliance of the US food chain on labor exploitation, sexual harassment, and other supposedly archaic labor practices.

Fourth, and related to the previous point, by focusing attention away from the nativist focus on borders and illegality and toward the entwined character of migration and regimes of racialized exploitation, CIW activism retraces chains of responsibility back to the state and the violence it sanctions. In this, it echoes Benjamin’s “boundary-destroying” violence, by revealing that immigration enforcement violence is merely an instrument of a broader legal regime underpinned by violence. This activism evokes the all-important concept of “divine violence,” a violence that is lethal for existing law but operates for the sake of the living, and constitutes the only secure foundation of a critique of violence (CV, 282, 97–8). This is not to say that we can readily identify the CIW’s activism with divine violence. As Benjamin notes, there is no urgency in identifying particular cases of divine violence, which, besides, cannot be recognized with certainty (CV, 300). Moreover, there is considerable distance between Benjamin’s own politics and groups, like CIW, that operate within the confines of US law. I also do not argue that merely having corporations sign a code of conduct puts us close to Benjamin’s revolutionary goals. Yet, I do claim that there is value in witnessing occasional breaks in the rule of myth, which indicates that transformations are not impossibly remote, that there is a revolutionary chance to fight in the name of the oppressed past and present (CV, 300; TPH, 254, 263). The CIW’s clear attunement to the past in their activism, to exploitation as a normative and sanctioned feature of the US project, and to the connections between supposedly overcome exploitative labor practices and the present makes CIW’s emancipatory potential exceed the mere improvement of their working conditions.

Benjamin and Latina/o Political Thought

The analysis so far builds upon and echoes preoccupations of Latina/o Political Thought while illuminating productive ways to amend some insights and advance others. Alfonso Gonzales, for example, takes the 2006 immigrant marches to be the fullest moment of counter-hegemonic power in recent history, because they were led by oppositional forces rooted in Latino activism, and mobilized a broad Latino coalition to oppose further criminalization (Reference Gonzales2013). Yet the CIW experience shows the radical potential of exiting the realm of immigration altogether with its good immigrant/bad immigrant frame. Cristina Beltrán expands on the problems of this framing by criticizing the identification of migrants with the strenuous work that they do (Reference Beltrán2009). This depiction, she argues, produces subjects valued not for their distinctiveness but, rather, collectively as an always-available mass, which overshadows acts of freedom that are imminently political (Reference Beltrán2009, 614). Beltrán contrasts this with the “festive anger” expressed during the 2006 immigrant marches, which constituted an “expressive instance of citizenship” that disrupted traditional notions of sovereignty (Reference Beltrán2009, 598). While I concur with this assessment, it can be complemented by a critique of the labor exploitation that allows for the “arduous laborer” figure to gain traction in the first place. CIW’s activism does not emphasize workers’ willingness to engage in toilsome labor, which Beltrán worries makes them threatening to the polity. Instead, their activism threatens the legal basis of the racial division of labor that allows for the exploitation of workers of color, the same racial division that makes them threatening to the polity in the way that worries Beltrán.

Finally, my approach is sympathetic to Paul Apostolidis’s project of tracking immigrants’ experiential accounts to destabilize the US racial and capitalist order (Reference Apostolidis2010, xxxix). Immigrants’ practices, Apostolidis argues, act as a counterpower by highlighting the transnational character of US capitalism in the Americas, contesting assimilationist ideas, and organizing democratically in opposition to precarity (Reference Apostolidis2010, xxxi–xxxii, xxxv, Reference Apostolidis2019). While also focusing on labor activism and its disruptive potential, I position it alongside the economy of violence and humanitarianism that scaffolds the law, bringing into greater relief the radical and threatening character of their acts of refusal.