Parcels

Memories of Salvadoran Migration

Mike Anastario

• Editorial: Rutgers University Press
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780813595245
• Categoría: Ciencias sociales
• Categoría: Sociología

In light of new proposals to control undocumented migrants in the United States, Parcels prioritizes rural Salvadoran remembering in an effort to combat the collective amnesia that supports the logic of these historically myopic strategies. Mike Anastario investigates the social memories of individuals from a town he refers to as "El Norteño, " a rural municipality in El Salvador that was heavily impacted by the Salvadoran Civil War, which in turn fueled a mass exodus to the United States. By working with two viajeros (travelers) who exchanged encomiendas (parcels containing food, medicine, documents, photographs and letters) between those in the U.S. and El Salvador, Anastario tells the story behind parcels and illuminates their larger cultural and structural significance. This narrative approach elucidates key arguments concerning the ways in which social memory permits and is shaped by structural violence, particularly the U.S. actions and policies that have resulted in the emotional and physical distress of so many Salvadorans. The book uses analyses of testimonies, statistics, memories of migration, the war and, of course, the many parcels sent over the border to create an innovative and necessary account of post-Civil War El Salvador.

PART I

DIASPORIC REMEMBERING

1

ES BARATA Y ES CARA

Couriers and Parcels in Transnational Space

• Forty pupusas in El Salvador = $20
• Forty pupusas in Colorado from El Salvador = $112

In El Norteño’s diasporic communities, couriers move parcels in ways that organize the emergence of affects and memories. Prices are calculated and discussed with campesinx clientele as couriers recall recent conversations with distant family members who are connected to rural temporalities. In this chapter, I provide an overview of the everyday economic and occupational practices of El Norteño’s couriers, illustrating how affectively charged transactions are linked with the exchange of memory-interactive parcels in one rural diasporic network. This chapter specifically focuses on socioeconomic aspects of the courier trade in El Norteño’s diaspora, providing a basis for understanding the ways in which memory and affect are repetitiously structured through couriers’ economic participation in a quasi-documented, transnational profession.

Who are couriers, and what do we, the people who study them, owe them? In short, couriers transport parcels to Salvadorans in transnational diasporic networks who are separated by diasporic divides (space, the ability to cross national boundaries, legal statuses, etc.). At the time this book is being written, approximately twenty-five years after the end of the Salvadoran Civil War,1 the Salvadoran government has formally recognized gestores de encomiendas (parcel managers). Couriers are a formal occupation in El Salvador, where, as of mid-2017, approximately 767 active couriers had registered with the Asociación Nacional de Gestores de Encomiendas y Cultura (National Association of Parcels and Culture Managers in El Salvador; or ANGEC by its initials in Spanish) and where more than two thousand had over the course of recent history been registered as parcel managers by Salvadoran customs.2 Salvadoran couriers transport hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars in cash and thousands of pounds of merchandise annually between El Salvador and the United States.3 They collect parcels in El Salvador, travel to the United States, and deliver them within diasporic networks, serving a transnational base of clients. The relative proportion of Salvadorans living in the United States (approximately one-fifth of El Salvador’s population4) frames the development of such economies, where a transnational client base can sustain the work of Salvadoran couriers enough so that they are able to make it their profession. Sociologist Alisa Garni explains that what sets Salvadoran couriers apart from other transnational traders (such as higglers in Barbados or women shuttle traders in the former Soviet Union) is that Salvadoran couriers tend to engage in long-distance air travel, deliver goods to clients’ homes or from their own stores, and leverage resources cultivated in their home country to build their businesses.5

For those of us who have studied couriers, the question of what we owe back to them is a local one. My key informant says that we who study couriers owe them a finished research product that engenders “respect, tolerance, and for people to learn that this is professional labor.”6 My key informants have also asked me for help directly related to their work, and I always try to fulfill their requests. In this chapter, I take these requests into account as I reconcile the important role that couriers play in structuring the production of affects and memories in diasporic communities. At the end of the nineteenth century, the American ethnologist Otis Mason wrote about the different devices used by couriers who transport human objects, noting that “there is no doubt that all of these various devices have had their influence in shaping and deforming the human body.”7 That is to say, the immense amount of physical stress that couriers experience is a salient aspect of couriers’ livelihoods. The stress is more than physical. In the twenty-first century, Garni writes about a Salvadoran courier sitting down to sew the seams of the duffel bags she drags through the airport.8 The temporal and affective stressors that couriers experience occur as we observe and interview them and as couriers transfer parcels that stoke and invoke memories in intimate diasporic environments. When couriers implicate me in their stress, I try (in an interactionist way of knowing) to navigate that stress with them.

The willingness of El Norteño’s campesinx clientele to pay a 560 percent markup for stuffed tortillas reflects an everyday acknowledgment of couriers’ professional labor. Salvadoran couriers regularly talk with their clients about showing up at U.S. ports of entry with hundreds of pounds of Salvadoran food packed at maximum weight restrictions in their luggage. Campesinxs who pay those marked-up prices require little explanation of who couriers are. Couriers, however, seem to repetitiously provoke anger and confusion among U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents, as couriers defend and sometimes lose parcels as part of the everyday risks they experience in their quasi-documented profession. Couriers are known travelers, transporters, defenders, and deliverers of mnemonically valued objects that are wound up in affective diasporic networks.

In El Salvador, ANGEC membership helps couriers facilitate interactions with the Salvadoran government upon entry into El Salvador with parcels from the United States. Membership reduces the paperwork burden, reduces the tariffs that couriers pay on imported parcels,9 and provides a structured way for couriers to interface with Salvadoran migration agents at the Comalapa Airport when they return from the United States with hundreds of pounds of merchandise. ANGEC members pay monthly fees and attend biannual meetings. ANGEC’s defined objectives include establishing and maintaining permanent relationships between Salvadoran families and fostering economic and social development.10 Historically, ANGEC has lobbied the legislative assembly in El Salvador to influence language surrounding laws governing baggage and courier services.11 While U.S. CBP officers may perceive the courier profession as informal labor,12 and while there are indeed unregistered couriers, ANGEC professionalizes and legitimizes the occupation in El Salvador. It is not the Salvadoran government that needs to understand couriers and their labors but rather agents of the U.S. state and the sources of information they draw upon when they confiscate and trash pupusas, transferring the cost of the confiscated item to a professional Salvadoran courier who has little room for retaliation or objection.

In the United States, agents of the state such as CBP officers can frequently become confused by, irritated by, or even aggressive with ANGEC and non-ANGEC Salvadoran couriers alike who arrive at U.S. ports of entry on tourist visas (sometimes with business visitor [B-1] visas) with hundreds of pounds of chicken, cheese, beans, and other food items packed into thin duffel bags (reducing the overall weight of the cargo so that more parcels can be packed inside). Before the 2004 negotiations of the Dominican Republic–Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) in El Salvador, ANGEC had hoped to secure a special class of visas for Salvadoran couriers.13 Despite being transnational economic producers, Salvadoran couriers are too small a class, often with relatively too little capital, and instead must settle for business visitor B-1 visas, which offer less reliable methods for validating their professional work in transnational space. The B-1, B-1 combination, or simple tourist visas that are typically issued to Salvadoran couriers create uncertainty in courier travels. Inspectors from the U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and U.S. CBP have asked me, at the time they are reviewing a courier’s luggage, to tell them more about the very people standing before them whose luggage they are inspecting (due to my fluency in the English language and the fact that I stated I was a sociologist who was studying couriers). In the spirit of my key informants’ request, I also write this chapter for those agents who read to learn. English-speaking inspectors and Spanish-speaking couriers are often unable to engage in the type of dialogue that could promote mutual understanding and decrease anxieties felt at the moment when couriers interface with the fabric of the U.S. nation-state.

I should finally add that as a participant observer who feels he owes something to the couriers he studied, I participated in the work of two ANGEC couriers from El Norteño. As a courier, I was slow and inefficient, but I could be useful when it came to lifting heavy objects, providing vehicular transport in the United States, or providing simultaneous translation for couriers as they negotiated their entry into the United States.14 My work earned me no direct pay, but it did afford me free flights between the United States and El Salvador for the 250 extra pounds of parcels that my passenger ticket allowed couriers to carry for that particular trip. To learn more about the nonhuman objects that couriers labored to move, I treated couriers as my mentors while conducting this research. This was also how I learned more about the socioeconomics of the courier trade, which in part organizes memory practices. Here I focus on salient aspects of the socioeconomics of El Norteño’s couriers that are relevant to understanding how the courier trade structures mnemonic practices in a local diasporic network.

ENCOMIENDANOMICS

Campesinx migrants in Colorado who choose to pay a 560 percent markup for a food product (aware that the cost of the markup exceeds daily wages of their kin in the rural Salvadoran countryside) need little explanation of how couriers make their money and the risks they face to run their businesses. There are indeed business secrets and outstanding mysteries particular to individual couriers that I will not divulge here, but rather, I try to explain to unfamiliar readers how El Norteño’s couriers produce and reproduce their market and business operations. Here I do not focus on market demand for a parcel but more so focus on the implementation of couriers’ transnational production of delivered parcels, centering on the ways that couriers navigate and negotiate multiple costs to arrive at a price that is generally understood and accepted by networks of diasporic clientele. The marked-up values of food, medicine, documents, photographs, clothes, hammocks, electronics, school supplies, letters, remittances, and sometimes even people in transnational space reflect much more than a nostalgia among clientele for the Salvadoran countryside. Couriers repetitiously invest and structure inputs to drive their business operations, successfully delivering these myriad parcels in conditions that are at minimum adequate and at best pristine.

The business operations I document here are specific to El Norteño’s couriers and are likely to be somewhat unique to Chalatenango and somewhat variant from couriers who provide services to diasporic communities linked with other Salvadoran departments, such as La Libertad or San Miguel.15 To help readers make sense of the business practices of couriers who provide services to clientele in El Norteño’s diasporic networks, I detail segments of transnational journeys with couriers to present a “restructured composite” drawn from the nonfictional incidents and details of multiple trips obtained from my field notes. To do this, I draw inspiration from Jason De León’s restructured composite of migrant journeys and combine “events occurring within one or more ethnographic investigations into a single narrative.”16 I also focus on these composite narratives because they form the basis of my understanding of socioeconomic factors that structure couriers’ affectively and mnemonically charged interactions with clients. In her ethnographic work with Chalatecxs, Irina Carlota Silber writes that “traversing time and place are critical components of my theorizing because this traversing is embodied in the lives of Chalatecos.”17 Traversing time and place are also important to the theorizing in this chapter, so I begin with a restructured composite of the segment of a courier’s travel sequence here.

FIGURE 1.1. Cheese being sent as a parcel from El Salvador to the United States.

TRAVERSING RURAL, URBAN, LAND, AND AIR SPACE WITH A COURIER

Forty-eight hours before we leave for Colorado, I am in the Salvadoran countryside at Mateo’s house collecting and packaging parcels. Mateo is one of my key informants and works as a courier to transport parcels between Chalatenango and Colorado (including Boulder County and the Metro Denver area). In one day, dozens of parcels that collectively weigh hundreds of pounds will flow toward Mateo’s business/home in El Norteño, and he needs additional labor to process the parcels accordingly. His mother, father, sister, nephew, and I are present to assist with the collection, inspection, weighing, and repackaging of each parcel.

FIGURE 1.2. A tub of coffee after it has been inspected by couriers in El Salvador, who puncture the parcel using wooden skewers in order to evaluate if anything is hidden inside.

As we collect parcels at the table, an older man in a cowboy hat with a machete strapped to his belt approaches us. He is holding a hammock and two bricks of cheese destined for his daughter in Colorado. The courier’s father and sister stretch open the hammock to make sure nothing is stashed inside as the courier stabs a wooden skewer through the bricks of cheese to make sure nothing has been hidden in the cheese. The man in the cowboy hat is an old friend, but he is accustomed to having his parcels scrutinized by the family in this manner, and he watches his parcels be subject to inspection without showing visible or verbal signs of personal offense. The old man tells me that his wife finished making the cheese this morning. No contraband is found in the hammock or in the cheese. The hammock and the cheese are tightly repackaged by Mateo’s sister and bound with masking tape. She weighs the packages and writes the daughter’s name and the parcel weight on each package. The cheese will go directly into one of the large freezers behind the collection table. As this inspection process takes place, other farmworkers arrive, forming a line to deliver parcels of their own that, likewise, the laboring family unit will collect, inspect, weigh, package, and, more often than not, freeze.

Clients converse with Mateo’s family and casually comment on each parcel as members of the family inspect and weigh them. One woman in line hands me a plastic bag full of what looks like a dark powder. Mateo’s father recognizes it as maíz negro (black corn) flour and comments that it is produced from small corn stalks that are unlike the genetically modified corn produced in the United States. He says this particular black corn flour is best for making Atol Shuco (a hot, fermented beverage), and the client confirms that this is exactly why she is sending corn flour.

Some clients arrive with items that Mateo rejects. For example, one woman arrives with a box of lidocaine injections and syringes intended to assist with a minor surgery for a client in the United States. Mateo politely tells her that he will not be able to bring these items through U.S. customs. Acetaminophen, antibiotics, and antiparasitic medications also arrive, along with statements such as fíjate que el cipote está enfermo (the boy is sick), where clients communicate brief tales of sick campesinx kin who refuse to go to a doctor’s office or pharmacy in the United States.

An older woman arrives at the collection table with two tubs of sugarcane honey (similar to molasses). She asks if I know her daughter Cristina in Colorado. I respond that yes, I met Cristina in Boulder, and I remember that her daughter misses the frijoles de seda (silk beans) and quesillo (a type of cheese similar to mozzarella) used to make pupusas. As I say this, Cristina’s mother stares at me with laser-sharp attention for an uncomfortable moment or two after I finish speaking. She then asks me if Cristina missed anything else. Cristina’s mother is taking inventory on what Cristina says that she longs for so that she can deliver it to Cristina next time the courier makes a trip. Friendly couriers who engage their clients in small conversations and who are attentive to the details of longing in their clientele networks can...