1

Who Counts as Human? Decolonization, the Production of Criminality and Solidarity

Egla Martnez-Salazar, PhD1

Introduction Who counts as human and whose lives count as lives?2 These questions are not new and relate to a colonial, racialized, gendered and capitalist history in which difference and diversity have been thought and treated as inferiority to justify the invention of some lives as deserving to be lived and others as expendable. The current production of criminality in the West --whose main targets are women and men from non-Western White cultural and religious backgrounds, particularly diverse peoples from Middle Eastern cultures, refugees and undocumented immigrants-constitutes a re-enactment of this exclusionary history. Since the 16th century, European colonial projects have institutionalized conceptions of who belonged within their inventions of humanity, with important degrees of variation.3 These discursive practices were later reinforced by Enlightenment projects through free market economies, warfare, state terror, law, education, health, and religion in different contexts --including colonial metropolises--4 and they were framed as rationalities inspired by scientific knowledge and noble ideals of liberty, fraternity and equality.

In Giving Sanctuary to Illegal Immigrants: Between Civil Disobedience and Legal Obligation. 3rd International SoDrus Conference. Refereed Conference Proceedings. (forthcoming). 2 Butler 2004. 3 Fanon 1963; Tuhiwai Smith 2002; Gilroy 2005. 4 In these metropolises the working classes, especially women were treated as degenerates, feebleminded and smelly plebeians in need of improvement under eugenic programs like the one in Alberta, Canada, that remained opened until the early 1970s. (Whiting, et al, 1996; Grekul, J., Harvey Krahn, and Dave Odynak, 2004).

This article argues that the human and the citizen have been contested political terrains and not given as naturals. As Diana Fuss has poignantly stated, In the past, the human has functioned as a powerful juridical trope to disenfranchise slaves, immigrants, women, children, and the poor. Some of the most ferocious and unthinkable events of our [20th] centurymass extermination in Europe, genocide in Armenia, apartheid in South Africa, repression in Latin America, ethnic cleansing in Bosniaall have been waged passionately in the name of humanitas. In America, the human continues to be deployed as a weapon of potent ideological force, its unstable boundaries perpetually challenged and redrawn to exclude entire groups of socially disempowered subjects: the homeless, mothers on welfare, blacks in prison, people with HIV/AIDS, illegal aliens.5 Therefore, who counts as human and whose lives count as lives are deeply gendered and racialized ideologies and practices crossed by processes of colonization, racism, patriarchy and capitalism, including its late phase of neoliberal rationality.6 These structural and cultural relations of power have fuelled deep inequalities, including the production of criminality that has invented categories of illegality and legality to define who belongs and who does not belong to powerful nation-states and ultimately to humanity. Yesterdays images of the primitive and uncivilized constructed as prone to violence and primarily ascribed to non-Western and Indigenous Peoples are re-enacted in todays inventions of the illegal, terrorist, alien and violent other. These ascribed identifications are imposed on entire populations to justify sophisticated technologies of exclusion/inclusion, and to further instil collective fears and anxieties that are easily embraced by many people within societies where legacies of colonialism, slavery and subsequent racisms are latently and residually present. And many within global northern societies, for instance, have come to believe this process, which is in essence a politics of re-building empire. As scholar Jacqui Alexander reflects, When we believe that the state has to intervene

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1996, 2. This is an economic, political and cultural process with unprecedented social consequences. Brown notes that neo-liberal rationality involves extending and disseminating market values to all institutions and social action, even as the market itself remains a distinctive player (cited in Bhandar 2006, 266).

to protect women and children elsewherethe enemy in the war zonewe are buying into the ideology of a patriarchal protective state by not examining the ways in which the same state undermines the very conditions in which women and children live within its own geographic borders.7 As Fuss reminds us in summary fashion, The human is not, and never has been an inclusive category.8

Intertwining data from ongoing research on Guatemala focused on colonial legacies, state terror and racism9 and secondary analysis on critical citizenship, migration and human rights studies, this work also makes important connections amongst differentiated peoples who have individually and collectively contested power as domination and have created acts of political and social solidarity, albeit in many instances reifying colonial ideologies and practices. It is in these paradoxical and complex practices that a Third Space has been dynamically activated to counteract what otherwise are insurmountable barriers and feelings of powerlessness and despair.

The notion of a Third Space I am employing derives from Homi Bhabhas insight that the action of the distribution and arrangements of differential spaces, positions, knowledges in relation to each other, relative to a discriminatory, not inherent, sense of order10 makes and situates subjects as contingent because they are already located within unequal relations of power. In these spaces individuals and groups build their cultural and political practices from complicated national histories and traditions, including systemic knowledge, language, dress codes, religious and spiritual beliefs and practices, which they complexly blend with elements from the dominant cultures in which they live. This notion of Third Space is re-worked by scholar Shahnaz Khan to denote the way in which heterogeneous Muslim women in the Diaspora negotiate belonging to both their communities, which very often

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2005, 4. 1996, 2. 9 I have been conducting fieldwork, historical and textual research in and about Guatemala since 1999. 10 1994d, 109 cited in Khan 2002 3; Bhabha 1990.

devalue them, and to Western societies (their current homes) that represent and treat them as submissive women in need of salvation. In fact, diasporic Muslim women are as complex and diverse as other peoples.11

I adapt Bhabhas notion of a Third Space, to signal a site (physical, cultural, and social) in which acts of decolonizing solidarity and subaltern peoples struggles are relational in that they transform not only the recipients of solidarity but also the providers, for the latter are also knowers and actors who have, in different contexts and since colonial times, altered and reconfigured notions and practices of material, cultural and political social justice. Indigenous Peoples of ABYA YALA (now Latin America) planted seeds of an ongoing demand for social justice against colonial and neo-colonial regimes. Indigenous women have played a key role in these struggles, albeit their visions and contributions were and remain marginal.12 Latin Americans from diverse cultural, gender, and economic backgrounds have re-planted these seeds under national security regimes which enforced state terror as normal governance and which were supported by Western powers, in particular the United States especially during the so-called Cold War.13

While the humanity of the racialized and gendered has been denied both in theory and in practice, many in these groups have individually and collectively contested and resisted this dehumanization when they have been legally declared to be noncitizens-alien-others, second-class citizens, and/or sub-human or infrahuman. As Wright says, tienne Balibar passionately argues that political contestation by undocumented immigrants in France has made a fundamental challenge to notions of democracy, politics, civil rights and citizenship.14 As Wright (who draws on Hayter) correctly observes, and as Balibar himself acknowledges, his work is highly indebted to the autonomous formations of undocumented people in France who,

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2002. Martnez Salazar 2002, 2005. 13 Grandin 2004; 2006. 14 Wright 2006, 189.

since 1996, have carried out spectacular protests against the state production of their illegality and have developed their own highly sophisticated analysis of migration, illegality, exploitation and the politics of free movement.15

The struggles of the subaltern, especially the undocumented or those without status, will perhaps not change entire structures of power. Such struggles may be temporary and fragile because they exist in cultures that criminalize progressive social agency; but in their constitution they are not only helping the marginalized and the subaltern but also the more privileged who dare to challenge their cultures, societies, and systems of power. Consequently, in doing so, the marginalized and the subaltern at timesboth in practice and in theorydevelop a Third Space that defies binary positions of good and evil, and modern and civilized, among others. Positions that are gaining prominence to justify national and transnational discursive practices of national security to support the rebuilding of empire. An illustration of building Third Space sites is provided by a sanctuary-like event16 in the Guatemalan Maya-Tzutujil community of Santiago Atitln, introduced in the final part of this article. The Invention of the Hierarchy of Humanity

Who counts as human and whose lives count as lives are life-and-death matters for they have material, symbolic and political consequences for the lives of concrete women, men, and childrenlives that very often have been thought and treated as irrelevant. This irrelevance has become more visible in an era of countless charters and declarations of human and citizenship rights. The creators of these abstract rights, as Agamben notes, can only grasp life in the figure of bare or sacred life,

2006, 189. In many Latin American contexts, the term sanctuary is not commonly used even by groups that have sought refuge in churches. I use the phrase sanctuary-like event to denote that the act of seeking refuge in a place perceived as having some immunity, the Church, is similar to activities named sanctuary. Moreover, sanctuarylike events are usually forgotten in scholarship about the sanctuary movement that affirms that this movement has only existed in North America and Europe.
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that is, life that can be killed without being considered a crime.17 Socio-economic, political and cultural conditions of inequality that create or exacerbate the disposability of some humans are simply erased by abstract and universal notions of rights. As Butler reflects about the current era of global violence, Lives are supported and maintained differently, and there are radically different ways in which human physical vulnerability is distributed across the globe.18 But what Butler sees as a new phenomenon has a longstanding history, for it became central in the projects of slavery, hetero-patriarchy, colonialism, racism and capitalism especially since the European invasion of the Americas in the 16th century. Thus, we must ask ourselves: Why are these processes so often invisible to us? If we have not seen these processes, it means that some of the ways in which power is being exercised is being made invisible to us, which means that part of the political work we must do is to make power visible, to uncover it.19

The European colonial invasion was not only an imperial economic project but also an identity and cultural project in which otherness and human diversity became the symbol of inferiority through a system of classifying people and lands as either civilized (conquerors) or primitive (Indigenous Peoples).20 As Omi and Winant observe, The representations and interpretation of the meaning of the indigenous peoples existence became a crucial matter, one which would affect the outcome of the enterprise of conquest. The discovery raised disturbing questions as to whether all could be considered part of the same family of man, and more practically, the extent to which native peoples could be exploited and enslaved.21 Drawing on Omi and Winant but extending their view, I contend that the invasion and colonization of the Americas is perhaps not only the greatest racial project in history but also a project of gender and class formation that presupposed a worldview which
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Cited in Ranck 2000, 189. 2004, 32. 19 Alexander 2005, 6. 20 Martinez Salazar 2005, 27. 21 Omi and Winant 1994, 61-62 in Martinez Salazar 2005, 27.

distinguished Europeans as children of God and as full-fledged human beings from Others.22 One of the backbone elements of this project was animalizing the Other, especially women.

Animalizing the Other and Scientific Knowledge The degradation of women and men from non-Western societies through comparison of them to animals was indeed an expression of racism and heteropatriarchy, and it established the basis for todays re-enactment of images of monstrosity primarily attached to entire populations blamed for the violent acts of a few. This practice was supported by scientific research and knowledge, which in Tuhiwai Smiths analysis are not an innocent or distant academic exercise but [activities that have] something at stake and that occurs in a set of political and social conditions.23 Objectivity and truth, then, come to be seen as concepts which are historically situated and situationally specific.24 Nonetheless, universalistic imperial and colonial systems of scientific knowledge have implanted the common idea that scientific activity is neutral and value free.25 This notion of neutrality made possible violent acts such as the measurement of Indigenous Peoples faculties by filling the skulls of their ancestors with millet seeds and concluding that the amount of millet seed was a good measure of intellectual capacity.26 Violence, as Guatemalan Maya leader Belje Imox27 rightly points out, cannot be seen only as physical but [also] as painful ways that gradually destroy and kill people spiritually, what we were and what we are over many centuries. We can see the result of this in many Maya communities of the present the practical effects of Christian indoctrination, the division and fragmentation of people in little pieces so

22 23

Omi and Winant 1994, 62 in Martinez Salazar 2005, 27. 1999, 5. 24 Bhavnani 2004, 66. 25 Tuhiwai Smith 1999. 26 Ibid, 1. 27 A Maya pseudonym chosen by this leader, a research participant.

this physical but more so spiritual destruction is used and re-used by political and economic powers against us.28 Animalizing the other, is indeed violence used to deny humanity to those invented as lacking creativity. On this, Tuhiwai Smith reflects, One of the supposed characteristics of primitive peoples was that we could not use our minds or intellects. We could not invent things, we could not create or produce anything of value, we did not know how to use land and other resources from the natural world, we did not practice the arts of civilization. By lacking such virtues we disqualified ourselves, not just from civilization but from humanity itself. In other words we were not fully human; some of us were not even considered partially human.29 The assumption of scientific neutrality enabled researchers, colonial administrators and explorers to conclude that Black womens sexuality, for example, was more similar to that of animals than to that of White women. A chilling example of this objectification is provided by the exhibition in early nineteenth-century Europe of Saat-Jee (a.k.a. Sarah Bartmann), a San woman, the so-called Hottentot Venus. While alive, she was often exhibited at fashionable parties in Paris wearing little clothing in order to provide entertainment to bourgeois audiences for whom Sara Bartmann represented anomalous primitive sexuality. At the time, Europeans generally thought that Africans had deviant sexual practices and eagerly searched for physiological differences, such as enlarged penises and malformed female genitalia, as corroboration of this deviation. After Ms. Bartmanns death in 1815, she was dissected and her genitalia were displayed in Paris museums.30 Gilman notes that the audiences that had paid to see Ms. Bartmanns buttocks and had fantasized about the uniqueness of her genitalia when she was alive could, after her death and dissection, examine both.31 If in life she was dehumanized, in death she was completely animalized. This linking of Black women and animals is also evident
28 29

Interview 2006. 2002, 25. 30 Gilman 1985, in Hill Collins 1990, 18. 31 Gilman, 213 in Hill Collins 1990, 169.

in nineteenth-century scientific literature.32 The following description of an African woman published in 1878 reveals the analysis typical of that time: She had a way of pouting her lips exactly like what we have observed in the orangutan. Her movements had something abrupt and fantastical about them, reminding one of those of the ape. I have never seen a human head more like an ape than that of this woman.33 Through the lenses of what they believed to be pure scientific methods, geographers and cartographers played a dynamic role in inventing Indigenous Peoples as different, animal-like figures; for example, in Latin America that of the cannibal (for men), and pig (for women). The cannibal was the sub-human who ate the true representation of humanity and knowledge: European colonizers. The pig was the available, sexually promiscuous woman34, the lowest of the low on the human scale wherein European women, particularly upper class White women represented purity, sexual control and docility. Recent studies demonstrate that the ideal condition of women in Western European society served as an index of civilization.35 Stevenson points out that According to this index, how a society treated its women indicated its place on the social evolutionary scale. The status and condition of European women represented the pinnacle of civilization, the result of a victory of self-discipline over instinct.36 By the nineteenth century, the ideal woman emerged as the prime symbol of civility and represented female emancipation as its peak.37

The Process of Producing Criminality

In the Americas, this process begun with the invention of the so-called New World as an open and empty space made possible by legal knowledge. Law, the
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Hill Collins 1990, 172. Halpin 1989, 287 in Hill Collins 1990, 172. 34 Representation of Indigenous women varied according to context. In North America, for example, they were usually represented as asexual beings. 35 Shoemaker 1995; Acoose 1995; Smith 1987; Weist 1983; Smits 1982; Fee 1973 in Stevenson 1999, 55. 36 1999, 55. 37 Riley 1986 in Stevenson 1999, 55.

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quintessential representation of civilization and peace, has been an extension of scientific and religious knowledge and imperial military interventions, for it has not only justified warfare, slavery and genocide but has also created a space on its own where it is seen, taught and treated as natural and not as a human artifice that is embedded in violence. Law, for instance, in the thinking of people like Hobbes, invented the Americas as a legally different space (a natural one) through concepts such as the Amity Line that defined the Americas as an open space.38 In this no mans land, man was no longer homo homini homo, that is, a man to man, but rather was accorded the status of homo homini lupus, that is, a man who is a wolf to other men.39 The Amity Line therefore legitimized the division between nature and law, and between human and infrahuman, and also legitimized the violent respatialization of invaded Indigenous lands; these illegal acts became the law. And when Indigenous women and men rebelled against these illegalities, their acts were criminalized and punished with all the rigor of the colonial rule of law to teach others the cost of resisting colonial ruling.40 If Indigenous men became the other of the civilized because their more sustainable livelihoods made them closer to nature, the Indigenous woman was made the other of the other; therefore, her already incomplete humanity was not only questioned but violently raped, both physically and spiritually. This process of dehumanization, later, had other targets such as Mestizo men and women, named pardosanother form of animalization, for in much of Latin America, pardo designates cats and lions. Pardos, most of whom were landless, were represented as the main carriers of vices and laziness.41 Pardo women in colonial Guatemala became sexually promiscuous par excellence and were said to endanger decent womanhood (meaning Spanish-European womanhood); therefore, they were criminalized.

Diken and Bagge Lausten 2006, 444; De Sousa Santos, Boaventura 2007. Schmitt 2003, 95 in Diken and Bagge Lausten 2006, 444. 40 Martnez Salazar 2005. 41 Martinez Pelaez 1982.
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The advent of modernity legalized the process of continuing dehumanization of the other, this time though through sophisticated laws and under the discourse of homogeneous nationhood by which all were equal citizens under the law. Those who rebelled were declared enemies of decency and the fatherland, and persecuted as unpatriotic.42 In Guatemala since the U.S. invasion of 1954, social and political criminalization has become a wide-spread practice that includes not only Indigenous Maya women and men, but also non-Maya women and men who demanded any kind of reform, even basic services such as potable water and electricity. They were named communist and subversive delinquents.43Again, as communists they were represented as modern cannibals, for this time they, in the minds of Cold War mythmakers, had access to technology to convert children into soap.44 According to national security mythmakers, communist women were most easily deceived alongside Indigenous Peoples for they accepted promiscuity and prostitution to please their communist comrades.45 Colonial animalization was reenacted in state-terror within Guatemala, especially against Indigenous women, and this modern state-terror animalization constitutes one of the most devastatingly vivid memories for many survivors. For example, Mrs. Soledad, an elder Maya woman, recalled: For me the worst thing is being named and treated like pig. To be compared to an animal that is one of the dirtiest is more than painful but that is how we have been treated in this town, as indian pigs. It means that if we are pigs for Ladinos [i.e., those who say they are not Indigenous but perhaps are, and also those who are not], so they think they are the opposite they are clean and educated and not animals. It infuriates me, even though when I first heard the word pig I did not know any Spanish so when Ladinos humiliated me I memorized one word, cocha [pig]. And I later asked some Tzutujiles who knew Spanish the meaning of this word, what it meant, and they explained it to me When they confirmed what I thought when they called me pig [i.e., that the Ladinos were being

42 43

Ibid; Martinez Salazar 2005; Grandin 2004. ODAHG/REMHI 1998; CEH 1999. 44 Figueroa Ibarra 1991; Jonas 1991. 45 Martnez Salazar 1998.

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derogatory], I was more angry and hurt. I felt Ladinos were telling me something bad because of their gestures and the hatred in their eyes. You know, sometimes you do not need to know the words in which you have been humiliated eyes and gestures have their own words.46

Mrs. Soledad points to a sociality, to a culture that allowed this treatment to become normal, especially in times of war (as state terror was named, especially by its perpetrators). Those already racialized and targeted as communist could be further profiled, persecuted, and exterminated because national security enabled generalized social impunity. This social impunity formed a backbone of a culture of terror evident in a widespread anxiety and a willingness to use authority channels to fix even the most regular disagreement amongst humans. Neighbours became the eyes and ears of a tenebrous national security apparatus that did not have to hire employees to fulfil its functions, for it had secured unpaid informants, both willing and forced. Many willingly spied on others simply because these others dressed and spoke differently or even because they listened to subversive music or read communist books, or did practice normal Christianity (that which focused on religious doctrine isolated from social conditions of inequality).47

Many Maya men, especially those residing in what the militarized state called conflict zones, were forced by the national security environment to disguise themselves as non-Indigenous, for if they were caught wearing their customary Maya clothing they were arrested, dragged to military garrisons, robbed, and on several occasions forever disappeared.48 Many schools, taking advantage of national security laws, felt they had social permission greater than in the past to harass and prohibit the wearing of Maya clothes by Indigenous women who for the most part refused to give up their clothing even when they were made a symbol of communist sympathy and backwardness. Thus, in many contexts the
46 47

Interview 2002. Fieldnotes 1999, 2002. 48 Fieldnotes 1999, 2002.

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demonization of womens customary clothing is integral to cultures of fear and national security that become appropriate scenarios for the reactivation of colonial and neo-colonial patriarchies, cultures which many privileged women contribute to and perpetuate, very often in the name of saving other women from submissiveness.

It was within this environment that state terror and absolute obedience to the rule of national security law were defied by peoples struggles, including a general practice of solidarity. As Howard Zinn points out, Absolute obedience to law may bring order temporarily, but it may not bring justice. And when it does not those treated unjustly may protest, may rebel, may cause disorder, as the American revolutionaries did in the eighteenth century, as antislavery people did in the nineteenth century, as Chinese students did, and as working people doing on strike have done in every country, across the centuries.49 In the early 1980s, in the Maya-Tzutujil community of Santiago Atitln where I have carried extensive fieldwork, hundreds of families sought refuge in the Catholic Church in the darkness of a night.50An act I see as building and negotiating a Third Space amidst national security and state terror. This was a time when almost absolute control of everyday life was the norm. Belje Imox, a former community leader, says that he and many other Mayas are aware of the contradictory role of Christianity in their lives, for it has been violent and paternalistic at the same time that it has had some agents who have been open to learning the ways of the Mayas, as he put it. It is important to note that according to survivors testimonies analysed by the Report on the Recovery of the Historical Memory (REMHI), coordinated by Monsignor Gerardi on behalf of the Catholic Church (and who was brutally assassinated in April 1998during peacetime72 hours after he publicly presented the report), at least twenty-five per cent of the victims of state terror held leadership positions in a religious or social group. The entire Church, but especially
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2003, 109. Belje Imox, interviews, 2002, 2006.

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priests, nuns and lay people committed to helping the impoverished, was accused of instilling the devil into the minds of the poor. For many of REMHIs witnesses, this accusation was the main cause in the death or torture of many of their religious brothers and sisters. One witness for example said, Land was the biggest problem and they [the powerful] did not want to give up and/or no longer hold on to their interests. And they said that those who organized had the devil inside their heads.51 Turning to the issue of the sanctuary-like event of resistance and relational solidarity in Santiago Atitln, Belje Imox recalls that when Maya-Tzutujiles sought refuge in the Church, they did not ask for permission, they just did it in order to save their lives. He also says that in seeking refuge, the socialization of the Church as a sacred place and space was an implicit everyday knowledge that was at work in a relational way because both the Church personnel and the people enacted these meanings. The priests and nuns did so by accepting the request for provision of refuge and the people did so by seeing the Church as a place that was almost untouchable by the forces that had securitized and militarized everyday life. Belje Imox adds: I believe that people put into practice this symbol [rejtaal]52 because the Church people saw the Church also as a symbol [physical, cultural and imaginary] that could not be intervened by security powers and this brings up another reality, that the existent law that supposedly protected nominal citizensand we Mayas were just that, citizens on paperin fact the law did not protect us in our homes and in our streets or workplaces. In other words, we were legally naked by staying at home because the army could drag us out, shoot at us and/or make us disappear by hacking our bodies into little pieces. At these other places [i.e., their homes] although protected under law, we were not protected. However, and this is an important point, by us demanding refuge and doing other activities we also challenged the process that dehumanized us and named us as lesser humans, even
51 52

CEH, case 2297 in Cuesta Marin 2001, 28 of 92. This expression may not be idiomatic [in English] but the problem with trying to fit the richness of Maya and other Indigenous languages into dominant ones is that they become linear expressions, which in many ways loose their intended meanings. When Belje Imox talks about putting into practice this symbol he means, that

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by some of the priests and nuns that helped us. Why? Because the power of colonization and racism is such that these become automatic responses even on the part of those who say they are progressive.53 This deeper epistemology calls into question what Gilroy names as facile notions of human fellowship and solidarity, whether they are religious or liberal.54 These concepts cannot be repaired by charity-like actions, but rather only by working them through persistently until they become a political culture. And part of the process of forging an inclusive political culture, are diverse peoples struggles to build a Third Space of resistance and negotiation to bring about material, cultural and political social justice. And these struggles, which have analytical value must be considered as important as the work of critical scholars. It is only then, as Gilroy puts it, that in the face of a whole, complex, planetary history of suffering, that the luxury and the risk of casual talk about humanity can be sanctioned.55 Because the human, and who counts as human, has never been universal and inclusive in practice; it has been plagued by countless exclusions/inclusions.

a symbol (rejtaal) is multidimensional for it can be concrete and abstract, visual and non-visual. For example, power is an abstraction whose effects can be very concrete. (Belje Imox, interview 2006). 53 Interview 2006. 54 2005, 36. 55 Ibid.

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