Indigenous women migrants to the United States from Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras find themselves vulneradas in multiple ways, that is, subject to layers of intersecting and mutually reinforcing dynamics of racism, exclusion, exploitation and violent misogyny on both sides of the Rio Grande. Shannon Speed uses the stories of women held in a migrant detention centre in Texas – ‘incarcerated’ or hidden narratives that she has carefully pieced together during years of visits – as a means of illuminating the intertwined structures of gender-based violence, settler-colonial states and neoliberal regimes. Although the horrors visited on those desperately fleeing from multiple forms of violence are now familiar to us, Speed makes her claims to originality through analysis that seeks to integrate fields and concepts that have been disconnected in academic discourse and in policy responses to this human tragedy of forced migration, detention and deportation. In particular, she argues that the conditions of settler colonialism, and their impacts on racialised others, in the United States and in Latin America, are more similar than different, as neoliberal capitalist regimes both actively promote the expulsion of the unproductive (poor and Indigenous communities) from land ripe for capitalist exploitation and extraction, and enable the exploitation of the labour and bodies of those so expelled, who must be maintained in a state of liminality, uncertainty and fear. The women's stories, which trace their decision to flee, the vicissitudes and many betrayals on their journey north, and the existential purgatory of their detention in, and, sometimes, removal from, the United States, demonstrate how, at each turn, the structures of dispossession, predatory capitalism and state corruption that forced them to leave their home countries render them objects of extraction. Their Indigenous, female status, frequent illiteracy and lack of Spanish language skills make them easy prey for relatives, ‘protectors’, maras (gangs), traffickers, police, border guards and detention officers who tax them, often sexually, at every turn. They try to escape the threat of literal elimination (one of the aims of violent settler colonisation), from gang violence and domestic and sexualised femicidal violence in their countries of origin, to end up held in detention, their captive and deportable bodies an essential – and disposable – part of the fear-laced discourse about migrants underpinning the US homeland security state.
Through these women's heart-rending histories, the book connects diverse modes of settler-colonialism and the way in which the bodies of those with least social power – Indigenous women – are expelled, controlled, taxed, raped, caged and trafficked in an era of savage capitalism unleashed by the intertwined legal and illegal economies, and legal and illegal forms of violence, on both sides of the border. It connects the public violence of the state in both north and south, with the ‘private’ domestic and sexual violence that nearly all of these women have suffered at the point of origin or in transit. The latter is denied by the US, Mexican and Central American states, even as they tolerate, or encourage, it through impunity, indifference – for example to traffickers – and collusion. The individual histories are comprehensible within this political economy of violence and criminalisation, and this volume makes a useful contribution to the literature on ‘crimmigration’, that is, the criminalisation of certain forms of migration as a justification for an expansion of a carceral state, driven in a vicious cycle by failed anti-crime, anti-gang and anti-trafficking policies across all four countries in question. Neoliberal multiculturalism, the book argues, is being killed off by neoliberal ‘multicriminalism’, in which these women migrants’ Indigenous identities are both erased (unrecognisable legally in the USA) and are also essential to their appalling treatment and disposability. By combining the human dimension in the testimonies with extensive historically rooted analysis, this highly readable and tightly argued book would be very useful for those wishing to understand, or teach, the complexities and inter- as well as intra-regional dimensions of the ongoing forced migration crisis.
The women's stories are used to illuminate the structural analysis of violent dispossession, not vice versa, and each narrative contains shadow presences, and raises further questions about how this violence affects and traumatises not just these individual women, but also those in their extended families. A constant in this tale is the presence of their children – sometimes left behind, sometimes violently removed, sent ahead, sent home, or lost in the bureaucracy of containment. Children constitute yet another element extracted from women's bodies and used against them, to extort and control them. Women's attempts to protect children in their charge mirrors the constant self-protection work in which they engage at every step of the migration journey, but which is thwarted again and again by the structural forces that produce their vulnerability. The inter-generational trauma caused to those children will doubtless be the topic of future research, but meanwhile, as the book concludes, these most vulnerable of migrants are able – are obliged – to find forms of survivance, that is, survival and resistance, within the most oppressive of circumstances.
