Diana Taylor concludes ¡Presente! with a meditation on walking theory and the “cultural coding” of walking which is never just walking (Taylor, 38). Recently, U.S. news has been saturated with images and stories seeking to reify the “migrant caravan” – an assemblage of Central Americans travelling mostly on foot towards the U.S. – Mexico border – as a threat. Each news story codes this reification in language that varies from subtle hints to violent slurs, but the “cultural coding” of a “threat” is there nonetheless. Like Hallie, I cannot disentangle this week’s readings from the constant reporting on the “migrant caravan.”
For Taylor, walking theory is embodied in a particular way by migrants who walk, one might say, for their lives: “For Central American migrants, scurrying and hiding in their attempts to cross the border into Southern Mexico to reach its northern border into the United States, walking is a tortuous, seemingly endless enterprise. Gaunt from dehydration and exhaustion, their feet blistered and bleeding, they tell of being caught by federal agents, shipped back to their home countries only to depart again, on foot, in search of a safer life. Their children, if they travel with them, refer to themselves as migrants, beings in motion who come into presence with no location or national identity” (Taylor, 37). In this response, I will read Octavio Paz’s theory/practice of dissimulation and Gloria Anzaldúa’s theory/practice of mestiza consciousness through the above quotation.
One way in which official discourse in the U.S. characterizes Central American migrants (and other non-white, non-European migrants) as “threatening” is by stoking anxieties about fraud. Can the state ever truly verify who is a U.S. citizen and who isn’t, and therefore who should receive benefits like welfare? Of course not. There will always be ways of falsifying information, and this knowledge creates great anxieties about who counts and who counterfeits. In “Mexican Masks,” Octavio Paz describes the theory/practice of “dissimulation,” “Dissimulation requires greater subtlety: the person who dissimulates is not counterfeiting but attempting to become invisible, to pass unnoticed without renouncing his individuality… Perhaps our habit of dissimulating originated in colonial times” (Paz, 42-43). I found this idea to be particularly crucial in relation to Taylor’s quote. For the Central American migrant, the ability to continue the “seemingly endless enterprise” of walking hinges on the ability to “pass unnoticed” because to “pass unnoticed” is oftentimes synonymous with staying alive. Border crossings are too often deadly, whether as a result of harsh terrain or armed guards. Once in the U.S., the ability to “pass unnoticed” forestalls the often deadly result of being “shipped back… home.” So continued bodily existence for the migrant often requires “dissimulation” as described by Paz, but what about continued spiritual or cultural existence? What does it mean to pass unnoticed “without renouncing [one’s] individuality?”
Paz’s chapter begins with an important observation about violence done in the service of creating and maintaining “Form,” “This predominance of the closed over the open manifests itself not only as impassivity and distrust, irony and suspicion but also as love for Form. Form surrounds and sets bounds to our privacy, limiting its excesses, curbing its explosions, isolating and preserving it… Sometimes Form chokes us” (Paz, 31-32). What is the anxiety-steeped official U.S. discourse on migration if not an always unanswered prayer that Form, in the form of national borders, will choke the unregulated spillage of bodies across forcibly defined territories? In Borderlands: La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldúa uses similar language to define the literal threat to migrant bodies that is bolstered by the metaphorical choking action of Form, “Do not enter, trespassers will be raped, maimed, strangled, gassed, shot” (Anzaldúa, 3). Despite such threats, as hysterically spewed by U.S. politicians when they cut aid, and separate children, and indefinitely detain, Taylor emphasizes the impressive indeterrability of migrants who, even when forced to start over again and again, “depart again, on foot, in search of a safer life.” How? Where does one find the strength to exist in a seemingly perpetual state of departure? Anzaldúa writes, “This assembly is not one where severed or separated pieces merely come together. Nor is it a balancing of opposing powers. In attempting to work out a synthesis, the self has added a third element is which greater than the sum of its severed parts. That third element is a new consciousness – a mestiza consciousness – and though it is a source of intense pain, its energy comes from continual creative motion that keeps breaking down the unitary aspect of each new paradigm” (Anzaldúa, 79-80). Dissimulation – that “passing unnoticed without renouncing [one’s] individuality – is a continual creative motion. Walking theory and “beings in motion” are continual creative motion. What is the enemy of capital-F Form? Of course, it is continual creative motion – slipping and spilling across national borders and across identity categories. Ambiguity and category confusion are at the heart of the anxiety so prevalent in official U.S. discourse on migration, making continual creative motion a dangerous practice. In this case, however, danger signals potential: the potential to employ not just a “tolerance for ambiguity,” as Anzaldúa suggests, but perhaps a method of resistance in the form of a politics of ambiguity, the ambigupolitical.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Boderlands: La Frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Book Company, 1987. Print.Paz, Octavio. The Labyrinth of Solitude. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1985. Print.