Queer Migration Politics

Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities

Karma R. Chavez

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780252095375
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Delineating an approach to activism at the intersection of queer rights, immigration rights, and social justice, Queer Migration Politics examines a series of "coalitional moments" in which contemporary activists discover and respond to the predominant rhetoric, imagery, and ideologies that signal a sense of national identity. Karma Chávez analyzes how activists use coalition to articulate the shared concerns of queer politics and migration politics, as both populations seek to imagine their ability to belong in various communities and spaces, their relationships to state and regional politics, and their relationships to other people whose lives might be very different from their own. Advocating a politics of the present and drawing from women of color and queer of color theory, this book contends that coalition enables a vital understanding of how queerness and immigration, citizenship and belonging, and inclusion and exclusion are linked. Queer Migration Politics offers activists, queer scholars, feminists, and immigration scholars productive tools for theorizing political efficacy.

CHAPTER 1

The Differential Visions of Queer Migration Manifestos

For a brief moment in 2009, Shirley Tan and Jay Mercado, a binational lesbian couple living in California, became household names.¹ The couple fought for Tan’s right to stay in the United States after she was denied political asylum and, apparently unbeknownst to the couple, placed in deportation proceedings. Tan, a native of the Philippines, and Mercado, a US citizen, eventually learned that Tan was to be deported. They had been together for twenty-three years and parented twin boys when Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrived at their home in late January 2009 and took Tan, a self-described housewife, into custody. After receiving a temporary reprieve through a private bill introduced by Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Representative Jackie Speier (D-CA), Tan delivered testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on June 3, 2009, urging senators to support the Uniting American Families Act. In her testimony Tan pled on account of her “American family,” her “two beautiful children,” and the fact that the couple’s heterosexual neighbors saw them as their familial “role models.”² Undoubtedly, this was a sad story, and the gendered nature of the couple’s relationship (a housewife and a breadwinner), their successful children, and their suburban, middle-class lifestyle led LGBT and immigration rights organizations as well as the mainstream media to broadcast the story as another example of the country’s broken immigration system, the problems of marriage inequality, and the value of all “American” families.³

While this extensive focus on a binational same-sex couple was a first for the mainstream media, Tan’s testimony built upon the predominant strategy of storytelling used to link LGBT and immigration issues since the 1990s. Before the situation with Tan and Mercado, this strategy had resulted in the 2006 publication of a widely distributed report titled “Family, Unvalued: Discrimination, Denial, and the Fate of Binational Same-Sex Couples under U.S. Law,” produced by Human Rights Watch and Immigration Equality.⁴ Published amid the intensity of the 2006 immigration rights and justice marches, as well as the onslaught of state legislation and ballot measures designed to narrowly define marriage, the nearly two-hundred-page document represents the first extensive report linking LGBT struggles with immigration. Several large LGBT and immigration rights organizations financially supported its preparation, including the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, Amnesty International, and UCLA Law School’s Williams Institute.⁵ Moreover, the report is published on the websites of prominent immigration sites, such as the American Immigration Lawyers Association and Asylum.org, and prominent LGBT groups, including the Human Rights Campaign. In line with Immigration Equality’s long-standing rhetorical strategy, “Family, Unvalued” argues that the central concern that LGBT rights proponents should have with immigration pertains to the ability of legal residents and US citizens to legally sponsor their partners for immigration. Secondary concerns include the rights of LGBT asylum seekers to be able to receive refuge in the United States and the importance of ending the now-defunct ban on the migration of HIV-positive people. The report’s virtual silence on the plight of undocumented migrants, the rights of migrants not partnered with US citizens, and its overwhelming emphasis on binational couples implies that immigration should be a concern for LGBT people because US LGBT citizens’ rights are violated under current immigration law.⁶ It offers little reason for migrants or migration activists to support LGBT rights. And not surprisingly, it attempts to ameliorate the threat that LGBT people and their migrant partners pose to the nation by relying upon normalizing frames.⁷

To be sure, “Family, Unvalued” is a strategic document that was designed to promote a normative vision of LGBT and immigration politics in order to appeal to powerful people like federal lawmakers and influential supporters of LGBT and immigration rights. And as a result, with its entirely inclusionary aims, it offers the narrowest terrain for coalition building between LGBT and immigration activists.⁸ Although this report was widely distributed and received immense support, it was not the only document produced by the exigency created in the political milieu of the mid-2000s. In fact, as mentioned in my introduction, three organizationally produced manifestos linking queer politics and migration politics were also written and distributed in 2006 and 2007, and another, inspired by two of those manifestos was published in 2011.⁹ As manifestos—statements that dramatically emphasize the necessity of the “now,”¹⁰ these documents reflect unique coalitional moments emerging from the energy and exigency of the 2006 immigration rights and justice protests.

Because migrant issues were in the public, those who feared they could be left out of any serious debates forcefully entered the scene to set their own terms for migrant justice. Manifestos are an ideal genre to create such a rupture. As the manifesto from the Audre Lorde Project (ALP) puts it, “We have prioritized our work with undocumented folks, low wage workers, and trans and gender nonconforming immigrants of color because we know these are some of the most vulnerable community members in this time and that a true immigrant rights movement will not be successful unless it is these very community members that are leading the way.” And as the Queers for Economic Justice (QEJ) manifesto proclaims, “Both movements are depriving themselves of the power and strategic insights that LGBTQ immigrants can provide. We, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and gender-nonconforming people and allies, stand in solidarity with the immigrant rights movement. With this statement, we call for genuinely progressive immigration reform that helps LGBTQ immigrants.” These manifestos put forth visions for queer, migrant, and queer migrant activism, rights, and justice that point toward coalition in ways that are unthinkable from the inclusionary perspective. They also do so in concrete and possible terms.

These manifestos also develop and advance a different political vision from that found in documents such as “Family, Unvalued.” I call it a differential vision of queer migration coalitional politics, an idea that extends Chela Sandoval’s notion of differential consciousness and Aimee Carrillo Rowe’s concept of differential belonging.¹¹ I begin this chapter with a discussion of the manifestos I analyze, both the organizational and political contexts of them, as well as their qualification as manifestos. I then analyze the differential vision of queer migration coalitional politics in the manifestos, arguing that these manifestos provide a political vision by conjoining a political orientation with a mode of political belonging that shifts among and between liberal/inclusionary, progressive, radical, and utopian political perspectives on the left side of the political spectrum in a way that points to coalition.¹² I end with some concluding thoughts about the coalitional possibilities that emerge from the moments these manifestos reflect and create.

Manifestos

As a genre, manifestos “evolved from sovereign proclamations of the 1600s into a form of radical protest of the 1960s.”¹³ Although they might be categorized as a traditionally masculine rhetorical form, feminists and queers have utilized this form, with those advocating women’s rights appropriating it at least since the French Revolution. Moreover, texts from the nascent queer movement in the early 1990s, including the anonymously published “Queers Read This” and the Lesbian Avengers’ “Dyke Manifestos,” are good examples of queer uses of the genre. As Janet Lyon comments, “Manifestoes chronicle the exclusions and deferrals experienced by those outside the ‘legitimate’ bourgeois spheres of public exchange; the manifesto marks the gap between democratic ideals and modern political practice. At the same time, however, the manifesto promulgates the very discourses it critiques: it makes itself intelligible to the dominant order through a logic that presumes the efficacy of modern democratic ideals.”¹⁴ The manifestos under investigation here conform to this paradox because they each emerge from political conditions produced by state and federal government, and at least in part the redress they seek is through these bodies as well. At the same time, the writers and producers of these texts uphold and advocate positions that are well outside the predominant public discourse surrounding the issues of LGBT immigration politics.

Just after the largest immigrant rights and justice march took place, in April 2006, the New York–based ALP, which calls itself a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Two Spirit, Trans and Gender Non-Conforming (LGBTSTGNC) People of Color center for community organizing, produced its manifesto, “For All the Ways They Say We Are, No One Is Illegal” (short title: “No One Is Illegal”). This text, written by LGBTSTGNC immigrants of color, received wide circulation, including being mentioned in numerous blogs and news sites; academic outlets like S&F Online’s special issue on “A New Queer Agenda”; in Juan Battle and Sandra L. Barnes’s edited book, Black Sexualities; and by organizations such as the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition. The second manifesto comes from QEJ, a New York–based radical organization led largely by people of color that seeks economic justice within the context of gender and sex liberation. It published “Queers and Immigration: A Vision Statement” in early 2007 after an extended collaboration among a team of national queer/gay writers, who are both migrant and nonmigrant, including Debanuj Das Gupta, Adam Francoeur, and Yasmin Nair. Organizations like the NGLTF as well as numerous blogs and academic Listservs distributed the statement, and more than fifty organizations, such as the ALP, Chicago LGBTQ Immigrant Alliance, American Friends Service Committee, and Love Sees No Borders, signed onto the statement.¹⁵

Specifically in response to measures put on the 2006 Arizona general election ballot that targeted LGBTQ rights (Proposition 107) and migrant rights (Propositions 100, 102, 103, 300),¹⁶ Tucson-based organizations Wingspan and Coalición de Derechos Humanos joined together to produce pre- and postelection statements, which together comprise what I refer to as their manifesto linking queer rights and justice with migrant rights and justice: “Joint Statement: Stand Against Racism and Homophobia” and “Joint Statement: Continued Stand Against Racism and Homophobia.”¹⁷ Activists distributed these documents locally over Tucson-based Listservs and posted them on organizational and personal websites. CDH and Wingspan largely consist of constituencies that are either LGBTQ and citizen or migrant/migrant ally and non-LGBTQ. The two-part manifesto was collaboratively written by a large group of LGBTQ and immigration activists in both organizations. At the time, I was a liaison between the two groups as part of my dissertation research, and I was also on the team that wrote and edited the documents.

The fourth manifesto is a work in progress, first made public in 2011, and has been the centerpiece of a national speaking tour by the San Francisco Chapter of Pride at Work, or HAVOQ (Horizontal Alliance of Very [or Vaguely or Voraciously] Organized Queers). “Undoing Borders: A Queer Manifesto” circulates in the form of an activist zine that can be freely accessed and printed from the group’s website. It resulted from collective efforts by the Migrant Justice Working Group, which has “been working in a variety of ways to resist the violence created by that [US-Mexico] border here in the Bay and in the borderlands.” Throughout 2011 the group gave presentations all over the United States and Canada, and it continues to revise the document by posting questions and soliciting feedback on its website. “Undoing Borders” is directly inspired by both the QEJ and the ALP manifestos, and its authors identify as queer people who organize together in the Bay Area.

Many manifestos are designated as such “retroactively to identify a text’s foundational status.”¹⁸ With the exception of “Undoing Borders,” which calls itself a manifesto, I refer to the other statements as manifestos because of their emergence at such a crucial period and the way they laid a foundation for the explosion of queer migration political discourse after 2006. Moreover, these texts conform to many of the characteristics of manifestos, even though they do so in innovative ways. For example, political manifestos typically refuse dialogue and are often resolutely oppositional and one-sided. While discourse in the public sphere is often imagined to either enter into or invite exchange, manifestos interrupt and declare, even though they may, and often do, function as invitations to people compelled by what they declare. Patricia Cormack further explains that manifestos are usually visceral and excessive in form, style, and content and that they “simultaneously describe and directly practice radical social change.” This point is an important one, because even as manifestos may seem to be utopian, their very existence is a present political action, a performative gesture that engages and alters the conditions of the public sphere. As Cormack writes, manifestos “occupy a space where practical actions and utopian dreams coincide.”¹⁹ The manifesto, as Laura Winkiel puts it, “seizes the present moment in order to intervene in history.”²⁰

It is counterproductive to construct limiting taxonomies that would delineate the rhetorical form, especially given that political conditions are constantly changing. Yet political manifestos frequently offer three argumentative gestures. First, they typically provide an “impassioned, and highly selective history which chronicles the oppression leading to the present moment of crisis.”²¹ Manifestos construct a chronology that attempts to cut free from past oppression by focusing on the present in order to create a “radically different future.”²² Second, they usually supply a list of “grievances or demands or declarations which cast a group’s oppression as a struggle between the empowered and the disempowered.”²³ Finally, a manifesto challenges the oppressor, who might be vague or very specific, while bringing an audience together as an “oppositional collectivity” toward a common action.²⁴ Each of these gestures may be offered in a variety of ways, even as manifestos often cite the formal qualities of those that have come before them.

Differential Visions

In order to understand the qualities of the manifestos, it is first necessary to explain the notion of differential vision. Sandoval uses the idea of the differential in multiple ways to describe and theorize oppositional modes of consciousness and action. In portraying social movement strategies of US third-world feminists, she advances the notion of “differential consciousness,” which depicts how these feminists both had to and chose to shift “between and among” ideological positions as the basis of their political enactment, “like the clutch of an automobile, the mechanism that permits the driver to select, engage, and disengage gears in a system for the transmission of power.”²⁵ These feminists did not have the privilege of engaging in only one mode of political consciousness, nor were the predominant and hegemonic forms of feminist consciousness sufficient for resisting global capitalist, postmodern cultural conditions. Therefore, US third-world feminists enacted multiple and impure forms that enabled them to more fully utilize available resources of power. The differential form of consciousness of these feminisms insisted upon a new subjectivity, “a political revision that denied any one ideology as the final answer, while instead positing a tactical subjectivity with the capacity to de- and recenter, given the forms of power to be moved.”²⁶ Differential consciousness is not merely a matter of survival; it is both mobile and principled, with the aim of achieving the end of domination and the reorganization of social relations by creating “coalitions of resistance.”²⁷ In this way a differential consciousness does not necessitate being able to shift into any political mode, but only those that invariably seek to resist hegemonic dominance in its multiple forms. Likewise, differential visions are not compatible with just any political mode.

“Differential belonging” picks up particularly on the idea of a “tactical subjectivity,” shifting from an orientation (consciousness) to the world to a mode of belonging in, and with those in, the world. Moving from a politics of location to a “politics of relation,” Carrillo Rowe is interested in how social relations can be altered and coalitions can be built in the specific contexts of our various belongings—those we are born or hailed into, those we choose, and those we long for.²⁸ Differential belonging asks people to acknowledge how “we are oppressed and privileged so that we may place ourselves where we can have an impact and where we can share experience.”²⁹ Continuing to value impurity and multiplicity, one does not have to “be” a certain identity in order to do political work. Who someone is, is constructed by where they already belong and where they choose to belong. Differential belonging also compels us to be longing, to desire relations across lines of difference. By so doing, individuals reveal that the divisions upheld and promoted within hegemonic constructions of belonging that put, for example, racialized minorities against sexualized minorities are not natural. Instead, differential belonging can lead to the creation of coalitional subjectivities whereby people cannot see seemingly disparate struggles as anything other than related. The resulting coalitional subjectivities provide the agency to resist in ways that are not bound by fixed identities or subjectivities as people learn to politicize their belongings and adopt impure stances that allow for further connection between individuals and groups who are very different. In different ways each manifesto discussed in this chapter reflects and points toward coalitional subjectivities.³⁰ Theorizing belonging at the level of the interpersonal, as Carrillo Rowe does, is crucially important. However, alone it is inadequate to understand coalitional dynamics at the organizational or group levels within the contexts of counter-hegemonic social movement. The idea of a differential vision turns back to political activism and social movement, and it requires conjoining orientation with belonging. In the next sect...