by Rachel Ida Buff
Rachel Buff is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and an immigration historian. Her most recent book is A is For Asylum Seeker: Words for People on the Move (2020). This essay was originally published on Medium and is reprinted here with permission.
I. Caravan: Thinking Like a Caravan
Despite having some concerns about traveling at a time of mounting epidemic, I fly to Baltimore in early March to give a lecture at a university there. Called “Thinking Like a Caravan,” my talk is based on writing I’ve done about working at the Tijuana office of the border rights organization Al Otro Lado, which supports asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border. Because of the U.S. “Migrant Protection Protocols,” known to advocates as the “Remain in Mexico” program, thousands of people from Central America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe are stranded at the border, unable to cross and claim asylum, as is their right under international law.
Most of these asylum seekers are fleeing repression in their home countries, much of which has been created by decades of military and political intervention by the United States. My talk traces the ways that U.S.-led capitalist developments, from the emergence of United Fruit in the early 20th century through contemporary resource extraction, have resulted in environmental degradation and human displacement in countries such as Guatemala and Honduras, the origins of many caravan members. Suggesting that we can all learn from their example of mobile solidarity, I describe the caravans as beautiful, human responses to historical exigency.
At the time, I still expect this talk to be the first of a series of events for my forthcoming book, A is for Asylum Seeker: Words for People on the Move/A de Asilo: palabras para personas en movimiento, which is at the time set to come out on May 1. Before I leave town, I plan a launch event at a local bookstore.
It’s roughly spring break and the airports are crowded. For some reason, my route from Milwaukee to Baltimore takes me through Orlando. Lots of people wear flip flops; few sport face masks. Nevertheless, I am gripped by anxiety. I’ve already decided to cancel a side trip to New York City, because my 85-year-old mother and I agree that it’s probably not a good idea for me to import whatever vector of germs I am carrying into her apartment.
My flight to Baltimore is cancelled, so I have to linger in the Orlando airport an extra two hours. Though I have not yet at this point become familiar with the term “social distancing,” I try to situate myself far from my fellow travelers. But I don’t move if someone comes and sits near me, because that feels rude. When I finally arrive in Baltimore, the friend who invited me to speak there picks me up and we go out to dinner, drink wine, and talk: all the things we would normally do.
The following afternoon, my talk fills a small room at the university library. Afterwards, a group of us sit around a table talking, laughing, and eating a dinner brought in by the humanities institute hosting the event. The public university where I teach has experienced severe fiscal austerity in recent years. As a result, events like this have become less frequent in my professional life. Its uncommonness highlights the vivid collegiality of the evening, as though the dinner took place in a room illuminated with thousands of candles rather than the institutional lighting of a university library.
During my two days in Baltimore, I am ill at ease, except when I am with my friend or the people who come to my talk. The trip feels like the end of something, though I’m not sure what. Perhaps it’s my common enough habit of travel, despite the damning carbon consequences. Or maybe it’s the end of something bigger: an ease in the world, a set of assumptions about my individual direction in it.
Anxious about further travel, I cancel a return trip to Al Otro Lado, thinking I’ll return later in the spring. I keep thinking about the thousands of people forced to live in shelters or camp there. They are particularly vulnerable just now, to contagion as well as to threats of further militarization and possible border closure.
Solidarity is always tricky; it’s particularly difficult now. A historian friend of mine and I first went to Tijuana last winter, a crisis period during which U.S. politicians justified draconian and illegal immigration policies by describing the caravans as f “criminal aliens.” There we were, ass-deep in other people’s troubles, trying to document or help out or some combination thereof. While I am in Baltimore, she texts me: “You know how it often turns out that white people in the past who wanted to be helpful were assholes? How do we know that WE aren’t THAT?”
I search for the words to respond to her question. What can solidarity mean at a time when staying away from one and other is a widely endorsed strategy to promote collective, public health?
As acts of collective survival, caravans provide safety in numbers. They create physical as well as metaphoric human chains across rapidly moving rivers. This timeworn practice of solidarity responds to the savage 21st century inequalities perpetrated by the capitalist processes of resource extraction and “free trade.”
But caravans of people surviving in the margins of border cities like Tijuana are particularly susceptible to brutality and disease. The epidemiology of pandemic proscribes close human contact, asserting the necessity of keeping a distance to prevent the virus from spreading. This can only mean contagion and suffering in the tent cities and detention centers in which asylum seekers are forced to dwell.
The close contact created among those walking in caravans and generated by advocates now seems dangerous. Noting that the organization works with people who are particularly vulnerable due to physical as well as emotional stresses, Al Otro Lado has closed its doors, planning to conduct its essential work remotely.
I am relieved to arrive home from Baltimore. My husband meets me at the airport, and we go to a local park where we walk and exchange news we have read, rumors we have heard, fears we have been harboring. It’s barely spring in the northern Midwest, the sunlight at once welcome and a stark contrast to what we suspect may await us.
II. Hordes: Patriotic Zombies
During our walk, we decide it’s a good idea to stock up on some necessities. We’ve heard that the supply chain could be disrupted, that there might be food shortages or mandated quarantines that would keep us in the house for weeks.
In what seems in retrospect like the half-life of a soon-to-be curtailed normal, our daughter has a Saturday-long counselor training in the suburban collar counties outside Milwaukee. I drop her off there and then head to a nearby Costco, angling my car into one of the few spaces available in the vast lot.
I join people streaming from our cars towards the low, red-white-and-blue building, like a horde of patriotic zombies. Inside, we grab carts and show the requisite Costco IDs. The shelves are full; the mood is one of festive panic.
In the half-life of normal that persists in suburban Wisconsin, Costco offers a five course Saturday lunch spread of free samples: cheese crackers! spinach lasagna! pizza! chicken sausage! chocolate-dipped granola bars! Although I imagine that many of my fellow shoppers are also stocking up against threat of coronavirus contagion, we are not deterred from frantic snacking, reaching our grimy hands again and again into the sample tables. Hand sanitizer does not seem to be in use.
If the caravan is a kind of mobile mutual aid, the fractious collectivity of Costco consumption constitutes a carnival of individualism. We are all there together, eating samples, rubbing elbows, swapping grins and germ vectors, thinking of the wellbeing of our individual households.
In a recent interview with Jeremy Scahill on the Intercepted podcast, Naomi Klein points out the ways that consumerism in general, this kind of prepping for disaster in particular, obscures the way we are connected, even in isolation. The consumer imaginary of the “Costco run” features determined householders stocking essentials against grim but vaguely grasped outcomes, all of us hoping that if we purchase enough toilet paper and black beans, we might make it through whatever comes. This focus hides the workers who have, quite recently, touched the food by picking it, preparing it, and packing it into the myriad containers in which it appears on the shelves.
The commodity chain that stocks the shelves of Costco connects workers and consumers around the world. The conditions of these workers’ labor, their health, and their possibilities for survival are directly connected to householder consumption. But the individualism of the Costco Run obscures this interconnection.
Like the spread of viruses, the Costco franchise is dependent on vast global networks connecting factories and workers in China and banana plantations in Guatemala with consumers in warehouse stores in the United States, Mexico, Canada, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Australia and Iceland. The relative savings accorded to Costco members emerge from global economies of scale: capitalist collectivities that obscure our relationships to one and other.
Though we are unaware of it, we patriotic zombies of the Costco run are also caravan members. Our health and collective wellbeing are interdependent with those of people who may not have access to Costco memberships, but who labor to produce the numbing array of goods on offer there on a suburban Saturday. If these people have access to paid family and sick leave, to health care, to a living wage, it makes a not-subtle difference, to all of us.
Joining the Costco caravan is a concession to the fear we have started to feel; stocking our household with extra commodities something we can actively do in face of the looming threat of contagion. But joining up is a mixed bag. I hate big box stores. I hate their endless and unnecessary repetition for miles and miles, like belts of deadly fat around the organs of human habitation. I hate the way they decimate and reshape the landscape, vanquishing all living things except aggressively landscaped grass and anemic trees.
We tell ourselves we’ll make one run, stock the basement, be prepared. But one shopping excursion is never enough. We now have basic supplies — pasta, beans, peanut butter, canned peaches- enough for a couple of weeks, maybe less. But zombies tend to go hard, stumbling forward, motivated by ceaseless carnal desires.
in this half-life of normal, we crave and can still obtain the things consumer capitalism provides for us: fresh produce, dairy items. We inhabit an unfamiliar vortex reshaped by fear, desire and hope. Anxiously, we venture out, into a familiar landscape that is as still as it is on Christmas.
III. Colonies: Creature (Dis)Comforts
Scientists trace the outbreak of the novel coronavirus to a Wuhan seafood market, where animals such as bats, pangolin, and snakes are also sold. Viruses that are common and harmless among such creatures cause diseases like COVID-19, SARS, and MERS in humans. Such markets are one source of cross-species transmission. But there are many other places where animal-borne viruses are transmitted to humans.
In the United States, the Chinese origins of this particular virus engender Orientalist narratives of outrage about such “wild markets” as inhumane spaces generating cross-species contagion. Like the term “Chinese virus,” this white supremacist story affixes the origins of the pandemic to a specific location, far from the presumptively safe, civilized West.
But racist stories about contagion elide the sources of epidemics. Science reporter Sonia Shah points out that pathogens such as coronaviruses, Ebola, Zika and HIV have less to do with particular species or local cultural practices than with the broad, global problems caused by environmental devastation and the way that people source meat and other animal products. The commodity chain that stocks the shelves of Costco with creature comforts for the global north necessitates constant expansion and development. The resulting deforestation and habitat destruction force creatures that once dwelled at a remove from human settlement into closer contact. Cross-species contagion ensues.
I think of the suffering creatures for sale in that market, like the thousands of animals confined to industrial farms not twenty miles from my house in Milwaukee. Commodified in global and local markets, all these creatures are in the process of producing and/or becoming food. Just as the landscaped hell of the big box stores leaves little room for independent flora or fauna, the existence of these creatures in CAFOs — Concentrated Animal Farming Operations — is foreclosed to their marketplace value. Recently, Costco has launched a massive CAFO chicken production operation in Nebraska and other states.
Such industrial farming operations pose peril to animals as well as to humans. The 2009 outbreaks of H1N1 or the “swine flu” were linked to industrial pig farming practices in the United States and Mexico. CAFOs promote contagion because of the common practice of overcrowding animals.
Though I rarely write about it, images of animal suffering are difficult for me to bear. After all, I was once a child. I grew up and raised children in a culture replete with tales about sometimes tricky but almost always loveable animal characters. Beloved stuffed toys accompanied us everywhere, including some that were cleverly offered by the World Wildlife Fund, in return for donations to support particular endangered animals.
When our daughters were young, we were introduced to the existence of pangolins by a picture book that somehow came into our household. That book contained stories about a thoughtful pangolin conducting a zoologically unlikely, but nonetheless vital, triangular friendship with a large hare and a hedgehog. Many complications ensued for these creatures; my household became enamored of the species.
Perhaps I’ve avoided exploring my feelings about non-human creatures in writing because they didn’t seem as intellectually serious, or as politically pressing, as issues of inequality among humans. As children, we learn to relate to a wide realm of creatures. But as we progress through education, we lose these connections. It’s not unusual, for example, to find friendly animals functioning as guides to primary school workbooks. In middle school textbooks, though, such creatures become extinct, appearing only as crops or as pestilences. The sundering of connection between human and non-human worlds is a prerequisite for sensible adulthood.
Describing the destruction of indigenous relations with buffalo in North America, historian Manu Karuka asserts: “Colonialism produces a desolate and lonely wasteland, through mass destruction of life, and mass destruction of the consciousness of life.” Though Karuka is describing the building of the railroad in the high plains of the mid-19th century United States, the ongoing processes of settler colonialism and capitalist development create “desolate and lonely wasteland(s)” and produce the deadly contagion we now face. What Costco shoppers purchase as creature comforts emanate from the long-term discomforts of other creatures, our fellow humans included.
Displaced from their habitats, colonies of bats are forced to alight closer to human settlements. At the same time that these colonies become vulnerable to capture and sale, their presence conveys pathogens harmful to humans. Similarly, caravans of people unwillingly displaced from their homelands by the combined forces of political repression and environmental degradation venture forth in search of safe harbor elsewhere. Displacement of humans and other creatures is an intrinsic part of capitalist development and settler colonialism.
No one wants to inhabit a desolate and lonely wasteland; no one wants to get sick from a virus caused by environmental degradation. At a moment of global calls for social distancing, our collective future depends precisely on a recognition of our interdependence: caravans, patriotic zombies, bat colonies, pangolin existing in complex relations with other species.
IV. Herd Immunity
We exist at an extraordinary time, in which the survival of much of our species depends on isolating ourselves from one and other. Around the world, travel and commerce have partially shut down. Searching for the words to respond to my historian friend, I began writing this essay to try to understand what solidarity can mean: now, or at any time.
The current necessity of social distancing is not the opposite of the beautiful, human act of creating a caravan. Both are acts of physical survival; both call on us to re-imagine how to be in broad relation, in solidarity, with one and other. Intermittently visible through the carnival of crisis, glimpses of alternative possibilities emerge. It is up to all of us to envision how they might be implemented.
Prison abolitionists have long advocated for alternatives to incarceration for the 2.3 million people detained in the United States, including 42,000 in immigration detention. In context of the current pandemic, the only responsible response to this looming health crisis is to free those in detention, to allow those waiting to cross the border to be reunited with their relatives across the border, and to provide free shelter for anyone who needs it. Recently, this sensible alternative has gained some traction among policymakers as well as human rights advocates around the world.
Globally, neoliberal policies of austerity have resulted in cuts to the social wage, including public funding for health care, workers’ rights, and education. The lack of support for public health, for paid family and sick leave, has led to the unnecessary escalation of contagion in the United States. The suffering caused by the diminishing of the social wage indicate the necessity of changing course.
The necessary shutdown is a global reset button, proposing alternative ways of inhabiting the planet and relating to our fellow creatures. From Venice, there are reports of crystal-clear water and the return of long-vanished dolphins and swans; satellite images show a marked decrease in air pollution in China as the nation stills factories and highways.
When this strange time end, does the machine start up again, do the skies cloud over with deadly smog? Do we resume flying as though it was a necessity, despite the carbon costs? Or do we recognize our connection to one another, to the creatures we inhabit this planet with; do we figure out another way of living here?
