Exiled Home: Salvadoran Transnational Youth in the Aftermath of Violence (Global Insecurities) by Susan Bibler Coutin

Author:Susan Bibler Coutin [Coutin, Susan Bibler]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Migration
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2016-04-14T22:00:00+00:00

Producing Deportability

Understanding how the Ramirez brothers and other Salvadoran youths were made deportable requires reexamining in greater detail the legal violence described in chapter 1. As readers will recall, during the 1980s, Salvadorans who entered the United States (the country supporting the Salvadoran government in its war against guerrilla forces) were generally denied asylum; in the 1990s, they were granted temporary remedies—Temporary Protected Status (TPS), Deferred Enforced Departure (DED), and status as American Baptist Churches v. Thornburgh (ABC) class members with pending asylum applications—and eventually were able to apply for lawful permanent residency through NACARA. As well, in 2001, immigrants who had arrived more recently or who had failed to apply through these earlier programs were granted TPS due to two major earthquakes that struck El Salvador. Although these remedies resulted in status and even citizenship for a number of immigrants, the slowness of this process and the limitations of temporary statuses meant that Salvadorans who could have naturalized if they had been granted asylum when they first arrived were instead still LPRs, temporary residents, or even undocumented when the 1996 immigration reforms were implemented. As noncitizens, these immigrants were vulnerable to deportation, especially if convicted of crimes. Deportability was produced through this institutional process.

To understand the legal technicalities through which Salvadoran youths were made deportable, I attend to law’s archaeology, that is, to the layering of documents, statutes, court cases, notices, and records through which law is constructed (see also Merry 2004).5 Examining this layering helps to overcome the ways that “wider historical contexts . . . over time are repeatedly silenced through the institutionalized legal processes of denial and forgetfulness” (Darian-Smith 2007:61). Crafting a statute, writing an opinion, creating a file, and issuing a document entail entextualization, that is, excerpting elements of other texts, documents, or records to be redeployed in a new case or context (Bauman and Briggs 1990; Richland 2008). Textual redeployments invoke texts that have already been deemed authoritative, make use of agreed-upon language, ensure that a new policy applies to a previously delineated population, and occur as part of corrective law-making cycles (Halliday and Carruthers 2007; Riles 1998). Each instantiation of law therefore builds on prior instantiations, even as redeployment in a new context alters existing law, making it part of a new legal conversation, and creates a new administrative moment (Urciuoli 2008). Entextualization thus enables law to refer, to look forward and backward in time, to “preserved possibilities . . . which act on the future out of the past” (Nelson 2009:312). Law therefore exhibits what Judith Butler describes as citationality, the “double-movement . . . where ‘to be constituted’ means ‘to be compelled to cite or repeat or mime’” (1993:220) as well as what Bruno Latour (1999) calls “backward causation,” the retroactive creation of something that was always already there. As “memory carries with it traces of past temporal and spatial relations . . . through such things as material artifacts” (Micieli-Voutsinas 2014:50), law can itself be understood as a materialization of memory.

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