Last week I had the great pleasure of attending a seminar at the Institute for Urban Research (IUR) led by the brilliant Miguel Montalva Barba, a 2024 IUR Visiting Scholar. Miguel’s talk, based on an overview of his work, covered several topics from the pitfalls of auto-ethnography, the risks of studying gentrification without considering the effects of racializing practices, and the challenges of being a critical urban scholar caught in the structures of white supremacy embedded in the discipline of urban studies (see Montalva Barba, 2022, 2024).
Miguel also shared some of his upcoming projects. One of these projects deals with the stories of undocumented Mexican-Americans who are deported to Mexico and end up working in call centers that provide services to English-speaking customers in the U.S. Miguel reflected on the different types of harm embedded in the process, for example, the violence of being “sent back” to a place that you might not know, and many times, does not even recognize you. Another type of symbolic violence was enacted by the call center itself. In Miguel’s analysis, the call center represents a liminal space, a bubble of Americanness in Mexican territory where the companies take advantage of the workers’ vulnerability. The workers might not have the right educational credentials and language proficiency to work in Mexican companies but are attractive to call centers. Their English skills and cultural knowledge of the U.S. makes them valuable.
Miguel’s point made me think of Nancy Fraser’s (2016: 169) work on racialized capitalism and expropriation, or “the ongoing confiscatory process essential for sustaining accumulation in a crisis-prone system.” For Fraser, capitalism cannot only be explained with the concept of exploitation. Instead, we need to conceptualize capitalism through the concepts of exploitation and expropriation and acknowledge the system cannot function without “unfree and dependent labor.” Racialized capitalism depends on exploitable citizen-workers and dependent expropriable subjects. The call centers represent a perfect example of racialized capitalism at work. As non-citizens, the bodies of the “undocumented” are unwanted in the U.S. However, they are still useful in the liminal spaces Miguel referred to, providing services to American customers. The labor of the dependent expropriable subject can still be extracted without them taking up space in the U.S. Something similar can be seen in Mexican maquiladoras, or Export Processing Zones, where the mobility of the commodity is always prioritized while ensuring Mexican bodies remain in place, far away from U.S. territory (Fonseca Alfaro, 2023). It seems the economic relationship between the U.S. and Mexico continues to be one centered around a regime of racialized accumulation.
References
- Fonseca Alfaro C (2023) Producing Mayaland: Colonial Legacies, Urbanization, and the Unfolding of Global Capitalism. Chichester: Wiley.
- Fraser N (2016) Expropriation and Exploitation in Racialized Capitalism: A Reply to Michael Dawson. Critical Historical Studies 3(1): 163–178.
- Montalva Barba MA (2023) To move forward, we must look back: White supremacy at the base of urban studies. Urban Studies 60(5): 791–810.
- Montalva Barba MA (2024) Questioning the foundations: the embedded racism in urban sociology theorization. In: Martínez MA (ed.) Research Handbook on Urban Sociology. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Featured image: Image created using DALL-E by OpenAI.
Claudia Fonseca Alfaro 