The Detained: Contraband Touch in the Carceral Borderlands

Eva Contreras had been incarcerated at Eloy Detention Center for three months. As the young Venezuelan woman waited for her asylum hearing, she shared the long journey she and her husband made along Mexico’s vertical border and the fugitive strategies she deployed to survive immigrant detention. Eva narrated how she has been smuggled—kidnapped by Venezuelan maras, handled and managed without her consent in the borderlands, and drawn into a contraband, or illicit, touch inside Eloy. The chapter, by relating conversations with Eva and her husband, argues that touch facilitates an excess sociality, a contagious feel that circulates among the smuggled—a concept inspired by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney. Touch is outright banned between those inside the prison—a contraband intimacy that has the potential to inspire disruption and escape. Here, the author focuses on the sacred as illicit, dangerous and prohibited from contacting the profane.