Border Solidarity: Transversal Alliances and Defiant Territories

Abstract

This essay investigates how border solidarity—that is, grassroots coalitions against the current state of migration and border governance—allows for a radical articulation of traditional theories concerning the foundations of solidarity. Drawing on four years of activism and participatory fieldwork with the New Sanctuary Movement in the United States, the author looks at specific coalitions within migrants’ rights social movements to argue against traditional or otherwise familiar conceptions of the normative foundations of solidarity, such as a common social membership, a shared moral feeling, or a shared experience of oppression. Rather, the author argues, border solidarity as a praxis of contesting border regimes clearly shows the conceptual insufficiency of methodological nationalism, implicit in all three familiar conceptions, for articulating the meaning of solidarity. Taking a cue from materialist feminists bell hooks, Beatriz Nascimento, and Verónica Gago, the author argues that border solidarity as praxis is grounded in differential interdependence and heterogeneous transversal alliances that forge new territories (and constituencies) in opposition to hegemonic ones.

Given the rapid expansion of borders and mobility control around the world, as well as the growth of migrants’ rights coalitions, it is remarkable that border solidarity remains undertheorized.

While border struggles have been a subject of widespread interest in academia and beyond, border solidarity, defined as a practice of creating and sustaining networks of disobedient coalitions against the current state of migration and border controls, remains undertheorized mainly because solidarity is too quickly identified with one of two prevalent frameworks: it is thought either to be based on a moral feeling of empathy or to arise from a shared group membership or experience of oppression. Both are utterly insufficient to properly grasp transnational border solidarity’s claims and practices as they reduce it to requests for compassionate inclusion of “outsiders” who bear no legitimate membership.

Drawing on four years of active involvement and ethnographic research with the New York City New Sanctuary Coalition (including participatory observation and semistructured interviews), in this essay I investigate the foundations of border solidarity. I use this term instead of the more common migrant solidarity in order to avoid replicating familiar dichotomies, such as the one between the supposed passivity of the migrant and the supposed activity of the citizen. I use the term border solidarity to highlight what these conflictual and heterogeneous coalitions (heterogeneous in terms of immigration status but also race, class, and gender) are fighting against—namely, the current state of border governance and the production of illegality that it entails. Analyzing border struggles from within social movements is crucial for understanding how the practice of border solidarity actively questions and rearticulates traditional philosophical frameworks, including a strong refusal of the methodological nationalism that seems to haunt traditional Western theories of solidarity that ultimately understand it as a function of civic identity—an effect of the synthesis in Western political theory between the political (and the moral) subject and the citizen.

Highlighting the practices (and pitfalls) of what social movements call “expanded sanctuary”¹—which includes the traditional provision of immigrant sanctuary and also strategies such as accompaniment, advocacy, litigation, and coalition building—I turn to the work of radical feminists such as Nancy Hartsock, bell hooks, and Verónica Gago to argue that border solidarity is a collective praxis that operates from within the constitutive and conflictual heterogeneity of its membership. Border solidarity as collective praxis not only calls the boundaries between “insiders” and “outsiders” and the limits of the institutionally bounded political communities into question; it also works through ties of differential interdependence. Here, Gago's notion of transversal solidarity and Beatriz Nascimento's analysis of the kind of antihegemonic territoriality created by quilombos are crucial for understanding border solidarity as a praxis of creating networks of struggle and disobedient territories within and in defiance of the neoliberal nation-state.

What Is a Border?

In 1998, following a series of protests in the banlieues of Paris organized by sans-papiers (undocumented people), Étienne Balibar argued that the border was no longer at the border—that is, at the territorial limits of the nation-state; rather, it had moved into the center of political space.² The dislocation that Balibar identifies points to the political relevance of migrants’ struggles, showing how, through their acts of contestation, they not only lay claim to certain rights and protections but also reframe, both institutionally and conceptually, the very meaning of citizenship and belonging. But we could point at another set of dislocations of the border, involving the implosion and explosion of border controls. These include myriad strategies, including the externalization of borders based on offshoring and outsourcing mechanisms of state sovereignty and mobility control. Examples of externalized borders include the EU checkpoints in North Africa, Australian offshore immigration detention centers in the Pacific, and managerial systems of biometric controls at “portable borders,” deploying new technologies for requesting admission, as in the case of e-visas and CBP One (a mobile application devised by the Customs and Border Protection) in the United States. But we could also point to the diffuse securitization strategies for the creation of migrant legality and illegality, as in the case of internal discretionary immigration controls exercised by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) within US territory, including the use of perennial surveillance devices such as GPS ankle shackles.³

The proliferation of borders and of bordering practices, far from simply serving to block or obstruct global flows, has become essential to their articulation. Moreover, it has allowed us to see border strategies as disciplinary, pervasive, temporally extensive,⁴ diffuse systems of “differential inclusion and exclusion,”⁵ even while they are, at the same time, constitutive—that is, even while they actively create identity markers and serve as instruments of socialization and individuation. Gloria Anzaldúa's elaborations of the concept of Nepantla, a Nahuatl word that refers to an “in-between state,” addresses precisely this heterogeneous, pulverized character of borders as “that uncertain terrain one crosses when moving from one place to another, when changing from one class, race or sexual position to another, when traveling from one present identity into a new identity.”⁶

“We didn't cross the border, the border crossed us,” a well-known slogan, was the point of connection that kindled my first conversation with Linda, a Colombian immigrant, as we stood side by side at a protest in front of New York City's ICE headquarters in March 2018. Sometime later, as we shared a bag of cookies during a break at the New Sanctuary Coalition's legal clinic, I decided to ask her if the slogan had any personal significance for her.

Linda noted that the extension of bordering practices into spaces and times that exist beyond the border-as-boundary did not mean that the latter had become insignificant. On the contrary, the border-as-boundary remains one essential element of bordering, one of many sites for the production and reproduction of space: “The border is spatial, the boundary has a form that partitions space and materializes an inside and an outside. Even when a border in space does not materialize separation, this is never just a metaphor.”⁸ Borders also place different emphases on different spaces of mobility, for while internalized and externalized border controls operate in relative opacity,⁹ the territorial boundary is made hypervisible, a spectacle of a continuous state of emergency and vulnerability that supposedly can only be relieved by the steady hand of sovereign power. Indeed, as Nicholas De Genova argues, “the securitization of borders only intensifies the perception that they are in fact always insecure, supplying the premier site for staging the perpetual demand for more securitization,”¹⁰ although, as Wendy Brown writes, seeing walls as sites of “pure interdiction . . . misses their staging of sovereign powers of protection, powers radically limited by modern technologies and paths of infiltration and by the dependence of various ‘national economies’ on much of what walls purport to lock out, especially cheap labor.”¹¹ Border walls are thus efficient in portraying migrants as posing a threat to the walled demos.¹² However, despite the spectacularized narrative about the dangerous porosity of border walls that spurs calls for enhanced border security, their supposed inefficiency is part of their operability. Border walls, whose governance, administration, and technology are in the hands of government officials as well as in those of contracted private security companies, act not only as filters separating those who can be included in or excluded from the national territory; they also bind these people together in a narrative of dangerousness and illegality. Consider the example of Mexican and Central American migration:

Although the border is one privileged site for the contestation of border controls, it is important to emphasize that border solidarity is not merely solidarity “at the border.” As Balibar notes, “Border struggles intervene in [a] field of tension, often contesting processes of exclusion and deportation but also, in their more politically challenging forms, relating these processes to the permeability of the border itself. These struggles assume many different forms.”¹⁴ Border struggles do not only focus on the border-as-boundary as an idealized locus of solidarity-building; instead, they show us that the border must be understood in its materiality. Hence, border solidarity entails coalescing around, and fighting against, bordering practices that extend far beyond the spatial border and, temporally, far beyond the moment of crossing. It also entails understanding how border and mobility controls are differentially experienced depending on one’s nationality, socioeconomic status, race, gender, and age.

Likewise, border solidarity makes claims addressed not only to the receiving nation-state but also, crucially, to the myriad actors responsible for managing border regimes. In the case of the United States, this includes, for instance, private companies like the GEO Group and Core Civic, responsible for running more than 90 percent of migrant detention facilities;¹⁵ BI Incorporated, responsible for supplying the tracking app SmartLink and GPS ankle monitors to ICE's Alternatives to Detention program;¹⁶ and Amazon and Palantir, responsible for supplying biometric recognition technology. Border solidarity is a key practice for investigating solidaristic alliances because the fight to dismantle border regimes highlights the democratic deficit of systems of state-sponsored neoliberal mobility governance and calls the limits of membership and the efficacy of existing legal frameworks into question, by simultaneously referring to, and moving beyond, the framework of the nation-state. Hence, it articulates a practice of solidarity that questions the established boundaries of civic identity and of social membership while simultaneously refusing a narrative of compassion, privileging a discourse of rights.

Against Methodological Nationalism

Relying on a materially and empirically grounded—rather than an abstract—understanding of bordering regimes, border solidarity refuses the traditional conceptual frameworks of solidarity that rely on methodological nationalism—that is, frameworks that either implicitly or explicitly accept the nation-state as their normative framework, relying on an a priori identification of the demos with the citizen, “where territorial borders are the main way[s] of determining political membership and civic identity.”¹⁷ Such is the case of theories of solidarity that, like Michael Walzer's, understand it as a function of cohesion and cooperation among the members of a group. Walzer sees solidarity as a function of citizenship or group membership and grounds solidarity in a bond of moral obligations toward other members of the community; he sees solidarity, in other words, as a bond of brotherhood¹⁸ and a form of reciprocity established through civic identity. This is not to say that all theories that see solidarity as a function of civic identity presume that those in solidarity must be citizens or that citizenship is simply the expression of a homogeneous, narrow notion of national identity. But even within theories of multicultural citizenship, solidarity involves establishing bonds of duty, trust, and reciprocity among the members of a nation-state (or a community of nation-states, as in the example of the European Union) that sustain and are sustained by institutions, procedures, individual and collective rights, and forums for democratic deliberation. As David Miller and Will Kymlicka argue, the social integration of nonmembers is possible insofar as they show “a willingness to accept current political structures and to engage with the host community so that a new common identity can be forged.”¹⁹ Despite the apparent flexibility of this understanding, the bonds of the multicultural community are only established if a common public culture supersedes an individual's private culture. That is, assimilation to a set of common norms (understood as “public culture”) is the binding requirement of solidarity defined as a function of citizenship.

Especially when solidarity is understood as a function of citizenship, theories of solidarity tend to overlook that the formation of a “common identity” is intrinsically connected, in contemporary societies, to systems and scales of subjectification structured by border controls. The very notion of a public culture is better understood as hegemonic culture and therefore reliant on the inadmissibility of alien cultures that might exist both within and beyond the community. These systems affect who is able to engage with the host community and who is perceived to be a threat to its very existence; who is a potentially desirable member by virtue of their “ability” to participate in the public life and who is not; who deserves to be included and who doesn't. Seeing solidarity through the prism of methodological nationalism, such theories ignore the historical and institutional global frameworks for border management and migration enforcement. This prism also assumes that “the migrant” is intrinsically passive; that is, that their mobility journey is entirely an effect of global economic forces, leaving no space for the exercise of their own agency. Migrants’ mobility is usually characterized by way of dehumanizing categories such as “flows” or “waves,” and their voices are only heard as pleas for protection or inclusion in the political community.²⁰ Their political activity, given their status as “outsiders,” is interpreted as a series of mere requests for inclusion, giving rise, for the insiders, only to very narrow reflections on “what ‘we’ owe ‘them’” and obfuscating the fact that claims for inclusion are part of a broader movement for the dismantling of dehumanizing narratives and institutions. The full force of immigrants’ political activity is erased by the same regime of invisibility that allows for their remaining within the nation only as “illegals,” “threats,” or “criminals.”

A critique of such regimes of invisibility and illegality is at the heart of transnational migrants’ rights movements. In the United States, the New Sanctuary Movement and its regional coalitions have revived the Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s, working with both religious and secular institutions that provide safe harbor, social services, and legal counsel for immigrants facing deportation and advocating for policy change at various levels. Seeking to address a range of criticisms that point out the patronizing aspects of providing or taking sanctuary as a form of resistance,²¹ the New Sanctuary Movement is “new” to the extent that it embraces an expanded sense of sanctuary that challenges the very notion of an “immigration crisis,” understanding it instead as an element of a more extensive system for producing displacement—through the erosion of traditional ways of living by neoliberal capitalism, or through military expansionism—as well as precarity and illegality. In this sense, expanded sanctuary is similar to what Naomi Paik has called abolitionist sanctuary,²² not only because it relies on a number of different strategies but also because it understands that, like mass incarceration, the discourse that distinguishes between those who may and those who may not belong needs to be dismantled.

Another framework for understanding solidarity sees it as a form of moral obligation based on a feeling of compassion or empathy for someone else's suffering. Solidarity as a call to action on the basis of empathy takes two main forms: either the outsider's suffering remains an utterly private experience that can only be grasped through an analogy with one's own,²³ or empathy is established through an appeal to a shared humanity—an appeal of the kind Hannah Arendt warns us about in her account of the “aporia of Human Rights.”²⁴ This empathy-based solidarity centers the experience of human suffering as recognizable and morally compelling, ignoring the fact that the recognition of another's humanity is actually structured by a social ontology of relations shaped by power structures that unequally assign personhood and moral dignity to different people based on race, gender, place of origin, and socioeconomic status. To ground solidarity in a moral feeling thus leads, in the best of circumstances, to a false “ethics of care” that reproduces the same forms of differential inclusion and exclusion imposed by border controls.

Despite actively refusing to reproduce this false ethics of care by placing a strong emphasis on the creative agency of transnational mobility under precarized circumstances, migrants’ rights coalitions, as any grassroots movements would sometimes reproduce the same dualism of victims and saviors. I had been part of the NYC New Sanctuary Coalition (NSC) as an activist for about six months when I was first invited to attend an internal meeting in November 2018. The goal of the meeting was to reflect on the struggles within the movement itself and to strategize ways of moving forward. The last task of the day involved addressing input offered by friends²⁵ who were actively taking sanctuary. At one point, a woman later introduced as Ana asked for the floor.

Ana's intervention marked the first time, though not the last, that I would hear concerns raised about how friends under sanctuary were often put in a position of unwanted vulnerability and passivity. This did not occur because of a lack of internal criticism or self-revision within NSC; rather, it occurred despite the fact that these processes were taking place. While the inability of all members to be physically present in moments of collective deliberation is always an issue in any assembly, in the case of sanctuary, their degree of mobility and immobility was radically variable. However, with the rare exception of when a meeting was held in a place of sanctuary, those individuals who were taking sanctuary had to be represented in deliberative assemblies.

It is crucial to consider the limits of democratic representation, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak does in her analysis of Marx's alternating use of two different German words for “to represent”: on the one hand, darstellen; on the other, vertreten. While darstellen commonly emphasizes the repetition of a given presentation, referring back to a presence, presented again, vertreten refers to a way of standing in the place of another.²⁷ In the circumstances presented by the NSC, the limits and fluctuations of the representation of friends under sanctuary by proxy (therefore, vertreten) appeared to be especially problematic. Because of the extended temporality of sanctuary, where a person could be confined in a protected space for months, this “standing for” effectively meant appropriating the political agency of those individuals in question, as representation by proxy in deliberative assemblies could easily become the rule.

Although the NSC emphatically draws attention to the damaging effects of what they called the “charity matrix,” it was not unusual to hear narratives that highlighted the vulnerability and destitution of some members. Moreover, some members would take upon themselves the task of alleviating the pain of others, which would inevitably take the form of speaking for them, representing them, and deciding on levels of priority for political action. Again, the distinction between saviors and victims often relied on a similar binarism to that which distinguished legality and illegality, citizens and noncitizens, and was rooted in a firm belief that “aiding friends” was a matter of answering a call to moral empathy. The entitlement that some members felt to act as proxies for others often relied on a perceived vulnerability, an assessment that was deeply inflected by gender, age, and race. “If you are here because you would like to occupy yourself with some charity project, you are welcome to stay to learn why this is not what we do here, and you are free to decide if you want to continue or not,” I heard on my second day of training with NSC. “We are fighting for justice here, not asking for compassion.”²⁸ Members were also asked to understand how human mobility is not only a reaction to social and economic pressures but also a form of resistance as people continue to move and mobility persists despite the myriad controls imposed upon it.²⁹ The ethos of the NSC was fundamentally grounded in a sense of “how our fates are linked,”³⁰ by a system of border and mobility management that affected us in radically different ways. This did not mean, however, that the well-known ethics of compassion would not occasionally erupt in the heart of the movement.

Understanding the act of taking sanctuary as an act of voluntary confinement and subjugation in exchange for protection in a moment of emergency reproduces the damaging “ethics of care” nurtured by humanitarianism identified in the works of Miriam Ticktin and Didier Fassin: a logic of subjugation through the management of life.³¹ Regarding the “emergency” aspect of such “ethics of care,” Ticktin argues that “translated into the sociopolitical realm, this has meant that rather than change the conditions in which people live and thereby improve human life on a broader scale, the focus is on alleviating pain in the present moment.”³² The temporality of the “state of emergency” is crucial to the establishment of unequal and paternalistic relationships between “victims” and “saviors.”³³ Too often, the present situation is abstracted from its conditions of possibility, the sociohistorical grounds of its emergence. This creates the sense that some are dispossessed without any evident cause and that a system of “protection” or “relief” operates with “political neutrality.” In other words, the humanitarian ethics of care, based on ideological evocations of compassion for others, conceived as “outsiders” undergoing an emergency, requires the erasure of the conditions that led to such an emergency in the first place. Once that erasure takes place, dispossession can be seen as an exception rather than a rule, further obfuscating the role of bordering regimes in the systemic reproduction of this condition. Although empathy or fellow feeling might partially explain why someone joins a solidaristic alliance, it cannot serve as a normative framework for explaining solidarity itself as it erases a broader sociohistorical understanding of the conditions of oppression for an ethos of sympathetic relief. On the other hand, in the case of a restricted version of civic solidarity, where solidarity becomes but a function of the reproduction of the boundedness of the polity, the plight of noncitizens is voided of its critical aspects and read as a mere request for inclusion. In both cases, we find forms for replicating the same structures of differentiation imposed by border controls. Furthermore, both empathy and civic solidarity fail to recognize what grounds solidarity as a collective practice and what it ought to be or to accomplish.

From the Shared Experience of Oppression to Transversal Solidarity

Ana's intervention that evening went beyond identifying regressive tendencies within the NSC organization. She also highlighted how other practices sought precisely to undo the victim/savior binary, showing contradictions within the movement itself.

Here Ana refers to the accompaniment program, a strategy of expanded sanctuary, where “sanctuary is not a physical entity but the spaces wherein all of us can breathe freely and in dignity.”³⁵ The accompaniment program primarily involves volunteers accompanying immigrants targeted by immigration enforcement or their family members to immigration court and ICE check-ins, to civil and criminal court, and to schools, hospitals, and other places. Accompaniment provides a space for volunteers and family members to journey alongside targeted immigrants as they navigate often terrorizing spaces. The premise behind the program was simple and yet powerful: volunteers were there to bear witness, support, and embody the community that surrounds the friend as they present themselves to the local authorities. The volunteer is there to see, record in writing, support, and understand that the event taking place, which could be as ordinary as walking into a public building, had, for their friend, the same unpredictability as “standing on the border of a precipice: maybe you would be allowed to turn around and calmly walk back home, maybe you would be pushed.”³⁶

As a form of solidaristic engagement, accompaniment shows that solidarity is not grounded in shared social identity or a shared experience of oppression—even if ending specific forms of oppression is clearly the aim of the solidaristic practice. In fact, the practice of accompaniment works precisely through the heterogeneous positions of those present. While “shared” social identity or experiences of oppression might be reasons for individuals coming together to form an alliance, they constitute neither the necessary nor sufficient conditions for sustaining such an alliance, since they fail to account for what the practice of solidarity entails. Despite these shortcomings, theories that claim that solidarity must be identity-based or grounded in a shared experience of oppression have gained currency. Tommie Shelby, for instance, while arguing against both a theory of solidarity grounded in the moral feeling of empathy and one based on a notion of group identity, outlines a theory of group solidarity and, more specifically, Black solidarity, grounded in a shared experience of oppression. While Shelby encourages alliances between Black solidaristic groups and antiracist non-Black people,³⁷ Black solidarity, the core of antiracist struggle, is, for him, an emancipatory group formation that is anchored in the firsthand experience of anti-Black racism.

For Shelby, racism, while differentially experienced, is a condition that generates a commitment to ending “racist ideology,” where ideology is understood as “a set of misleading beliefs and implicit attitudes about ‘races’ or race relations whose wide currency serves a hegemonic social function.”³⁹ Shelby's cognitivist conception of ideology⁴⁰ seems to imply an immediate refusal of racism by those who suffer racism, and hence their immediate commitment to ending racist ideology. José Medina, who subscribes to a “post-positivist realist” approach to social identity, goes further, claiming that a shared experience of oppression results directly from belonging to a specific identity group. In The Epistemology of Resistance (2013), Medina argues that people belonging to various minority groups, including racialized and sexual minorities, experience oppression within distinct social contexts that provide them with certain “epistemic advantages.” These epistemic advantages arise from the fact that a continuous, firsthand experience of oppression provides marginalized people with an immediate consciousness of their subjugation, according to Medina. That is, there is an intrinsic immediacy assumed between suffering oppression and knowing and conceptually articulating such an experience. Moreover, oppressed people are presumed to possess an epistemic advantage that results from the need to understand the perspective of their oppressors for various reasons. For example, they may seek to mitigate the adverse consequences of the power of privilege by finding more effective ways to navigate them. To achieve this, Medina suggests, oppressed people learn to internalize the viewpoint of the other, attempting to identify with and comprehend their worldview. This, Medina argues, leads to an “epistemic virtue” that he calls “meta-lucidity”: the ability to be open-minded and curious about worldviews different from one's own, to “be in someone else's shoes.”⁴¹ This “epistemic virtue” is ultimately the foundation of solidarity, meaning that oppressed people will have these particular “epistemic advantages” as a result of the experiences of oppression they have undergone, and they will thus be “phenomenologically equipped” to be in solidarity with one another.⁴²

Both accounts, Shelby's and Medina's, despite their differences, sustain a belief in a kind of immediate transition between an individual experience of oppression and the conceptual articulation of that experience: a kind of normative transparent window on lived experience opened by consciousness. This cognitivist approach to the consciousness of oppression conceals the fact that experienced oppression does not translate immediately into individual consciousness of oppression (or to its evaluation as a negative experience insofar as it curtails one's freedom). After all, forms of oppression such as sexism, ableism, racism, and xenophobia, just to name a few, are justified and reproduced by collective consciousness, social practices, and institutions. Therefore, emancipation cannot occur merely by virtue of the epistemic transparency of oppression experienced by marginalized peoples precisely because the formation of individual consciousness is mediated by collective consciousness, social practices, and institutions. While there is a mutually sustaining relationship between social practices and social consciousness, epistemic emancipation is mediated and therefore dependent on social struggle or social transformation. To think that the shared consciousness of oppression is what brings a group together or forms solidarity is to ignore the fact that the shared consciousness of oppression is a result of coming together—that is, that consciousness of oppression is not a given. Or, as Robin Celikates argues in “Remaking the Demos from Below,” there is “no basis for the assumption that there is some kind of automatism linking positionality (or identity) and critical insight.”⁴³ Instead, it is always a collective achievement that is only possible through social practice.

This is a central point stressed by materialist feminists. Nancy Hartsock's “The Feminist Standpoint,” for instance, places a particular emphasis on the awareness of the gendered division of labor as the critical ground for the feminist standpoint; Hartsock marks a distinction between being a woman (by virtue of one's social identity as a woman) and a feminist standpoint, “to indicate both the achieved character of a standpoint and that a standpoint by definition carries a liberatory potential.”⁴⁴ Hartsock argues that the epistemological elements contested by the feminist standpoint (such as the belief that women are naturally docile or naturally suited for some activities and not others) are, in fact, consequences of the gendered division of labor. If there is a primacy of praxis over ideas and beliefs, then feminism's liberatory potential entails dismantling the former. Two elements are central here: first, the dependence of epistemic frameworks on conditions of social reproduction, meaning that in order to change the former, there must be a modification of the latter. This is not to say that the oppressed person is necessarily unaware of their exploitation but that, even if they are aware, they may find its justification in practices and narratives that normalize and reproduce such abuse in spite of their pain and outrage. Second, and crucial to my point here, is that such an achievement is always collective: a collective social practice that leads to a collective consciousness of oppression. People who have been oppressed may have a more meaningful, consequential, and complex understanding of the oppression they suffer in this collective process of working through internalized oppression, fear, and feelings of inferiority.⁴⁵ But, this epistemic “privilege”⁴⁶ is not due to the epistemic transparency of oppression; such consciousness is only achieved through social engagements.

Moreover, to ground solidarity on a “shared experience of pain”—especially when pain is understood in a descriptive and not a structural way—leads to a series of problems aptly identified by bell hooks. In outlining the difficulties and the urgency of sisterhood within the feminist movement, she describes “the basis of bonding [in] shared victimization, hence the emphasis on common oppression” as “bourgeois women's liberationism” that “directly reflects male supremacist thinking.”⁴⁷ “Rather than bond on the basis of shared victimization or in response to a false sense of common enemy, we can bond over the political commitment to end sexist oppression”⁴⁸ produced and reproduced by institutions and individuals, independently of their gender. In the case of border solidarity, “most people in the Global North never or rarely directly experience the borders these migrants confront, run into, seek to cross, shift, and circumvent, and this fundamental difference leads to significant differences in knowledge and awareness”⁴⁹ that are elaborated through practices of resistance and contestation of border regimes. But this is not an individual's solipsistic achievement; it illustrates, rather, a collective praxis that allows for the reconceptualization and the collective formation of a new vocabulary for understanding systemic experiences of oppression from within heterogeneity.⁵⁰ Organizing takes many different forms: working through and learning from each other's cultural codes during long assemblies; learning the polysemic significance of New York City's geography and designing a map of safe and unsafe zones based on one's migration status; bringing the collective together to structure a new policy proposal; creating and managing fundraising campaigns—all of this while sharing meals, long nights, and care work. And, as with any political practice, even when people who directly suffered certain forms of oppression took the lead, this did not mean that no revisions would prove necessary, as Ana pointed out in her criticism, where a leadership made up of people who had taken sanctuary before would not be exempt from reproducing certain features of the patterns of appropriation they fought so hard against. Solidarity, far from signaling a moment of closure, achievement, or the constitution of a bounded community working in unison to reach a specific liberatory purpose, is a praxis that operates in conflict and in the constant (re)negotiation and (re)configuration of its strategies.

The question of boundedness—of a common identity, a community, and a territory—is relevant here. The polysemic and extended character of bordering regimes means not only that some migrants inhabit multiple and sometimes even antagonistic identities but also that the practice of border struggle involves fighting against national and local bordering institutions and strategies while simultaneously creating alliances that exceed and refuse the boundaries of the nation. Offering an alternative to an internationalism based on national boundaries that understands the working class as a waged labor force (thus excluding other essential forms of labor such as domestic care, indentured servitude, and forced labor), Gago's description of transversal solidarity comes closer to accounting for the formation of solidaristic alliances in border solidarity movements. For Gago, transversal solidarity operates at two levels. First, it refuses homogenizing descriptions of identity, attending to local practices and institutions while avoiding methodological nationalism by, second, emphasizing “what produces a connection between trajectories, experiences, and struggles which happen in diverse spaces.”⁵¹ Transversal solidarity builds on structural affinities and differences, creating activist networks that work not only through sameness but also through different practices and landscapes, learning from and supporting one another. So while US grassroots movements may be concerned with expanding opportunities for fuller inclusion (including the provision of rights and of regulated labor) for racialized migrants, Central and South American movements may be concerned with the difficulties of including deported migrants. Even if local forms of social and institutional exclusion may differ, they still work together, tracing commonalities and communities in difference.⁵² Or, to take another example, when migrants and feminist collectives in the United States come together to fight against the forced sterilization of women under ICE custody, they learn from, and in coalition with, Australian-based feminist groups who have a long history of fighting against the coerced sterilization of Aboriginal women and, more recently, of asylum-seekers under custody in offshore detention centers. Likewise, US- and EU-based grassroots organizations come together to analyze and organize against the increasing power of big tech, with its contractors working on mobility governance and data extraction targeting migrants.⁵³

As Gago writes, transversal solidarity has brought about “a shift from the neoliberal language of recognition of minorities,”⁵⁴ moving toward broad systemic change, through the transversality and interconnectivity of various movements that would, individually, be considered minoritarian and even potentially sectarian. Transversality is not, therefore, an exclusive characteristic of border solidarity but a feature of solidarity tout court. It has been overlooked not only by theorists who focus on moral sentiment and on shared identity or oppression but also by those who describe solidarity as fundamentally a practice working exclusively within, and making claims on, the nation-state. In other words, solidarity is, in these accounts, a form of struggle subordinated to and dependent on the welfare state⁵⁵—a conclusion that can only be reached if one looks at grassroots movements “from above.” However, transversality, instead of connecting through identity-based (or nationally bounded) shared oppression or through morally principled compassion, puts forward a form of transnational popular power, “intermittent and fragile [popular] sovereign forms . . . capable of producing new forms of power from below.”⁵⁶

Defiant Territories

Although transversal solidarity does not exclude border solidarity, the latter, by virtue of the polysemic character of its object of contestation—that is, by virtue of the nature of contemporary border regimes—activates ways of “producing power from below” that reconstitute and redesign territories in a very explicit way.⁵⁷ This claim may go against the literature in critical migration studies that understands border struggles as forms of deterritorialization or nonterritorial membership.⁵⁸ I would like to challenge these descriptions, which retain Eurocentric and essentially nationalistic definitions of territory as jurisdictional space and the bounded limits of sovereign power. These frameworks are insufficient if our aim is to properly grasp the idea of territoriality as transversally articulated by border solidarity; their understanding of territory finds its justification in the passage from popular to state sovereignty and the consolidation of the latter. Border struggles, however, highlight precisely how the fortification and multiplication of borders account for the erosion of state sovereignty and of inter- and transnational systems of protection for people on the move, as well as account for the criminalization of mobility. As Brown writes, “Rather than resurgent expressions of nation-state sovereignty, the new walls are icons of its erosion . . . What appears at first blush as the articulation of state sovereignty actually expresses its diminution relative to other kinds of global forces—the waning relevance and cohesiveness of the form.”⁵⁹ Hence, a defining feature of border solidarity is not the suspension of territoriality but the creation, through transversal alliances, of conflicting territories within and in defiance of the hegemonic state and neoliberal territory.

Border solidarity, as a praxis, is intrinsically related to a rearticulation of territories, considered through nonhegemonic conceptual models that offer multilayered understandings of the relationship between territoriality, on the one hand, and nation-state sovereignty, on the other. Models stemming from former colonies, where the passage from “people” to “nation” has always been highly conflictual and exclusionary, are particularly useful here.

Take the example of maroon communities, or quilombos. Sociologist Beatriz Nascimento takes the case of quilombola communities in Brazil to think about alternative forms of territoriality. Nascimento's thesis is that quilombos have historically served as alternative social systems organized by enslaved people not only in resistance to colonialism and slavery but also as deliberately constructed “spaces of freedom.” According to Nascimento, quilombos were neither the products of “spontaneous flight in the sense of anarchy and disorganization” nor the results of a “frustrated attempt to take power,” nor a “negative reaction of flight and defense.” Rather, “flight, far from being spontaneous, or motivated by an incapacity to struggle, is . . . the consequence of a whole process of reorganization and contestation against the established order.”⁶⁰ As a form of collective liberation, quilombos are marked by the constitution of a community mainly created and organized by Black communities but also composed of exploited peoples from different backgrounds, including Indigenous peoples and mixed-race people.⁶¹ Such communities stand as paradigmatic examples of the establishment of new, usually interconnected territories within and in response to the segregating and violent hegemonic order. Quilombos are therefore created not as a form of escapism but rather as disobedient forms of collective organization that highlight the moral (and certainly democratic) deficit of colonial rule and (in the example of Brazil) nation-state sovereignty.⁶²

The praxis of creating a network of disobedient territories is also a defining element of border solidarity. For instance, the practice of providing sanctuary is a paradigmatic case of collectively inhabiting an ordinary space in a way that suspends the current state of affairs and creates, in open defiance of the prevalent “law of the land,” a deportation-free zone. It is worth noting that there is no legal provision that permits specific spaces or buildings to harbor immigrants facing deportation. In fact, US federal legislation allows for the prosecution of anyone who “conceals, harbors, and shields from detection” a migrant facing deportation.⁶³ What defines shelter-sanctuary, therefore, is not a practice of silent harboring, of escaping deportation by sheltering in a protected space, but a loud and defiant act of civil disobedience. What sustains the deportation-free zone is not a special provision granted to religious institutions, an exemption from immigration laws, but the communal aspects of sanctuary: mutual aid networks, advocacy, public awareness, and litigation. This zone, carved out through collective resistance, takes us beyond the demand for the observance of individual rights to protest as a form of disobedience, generating spaces of collective power not only through the local grassroots organization directly involved but also through a transversal network of allies. These deportation-free zones, new territories of defiant collective self-determination and their respective constituencies, are themselves neither homogeneous nor free of conflict or regressive tendencies, as Ana pointed out in discussing the risks of appropriation and capture in efforts to create shelter and sanctuary. What holds border solidarity to its emancipatory goal is the ability to generate new territories, hence new constituencies, and bonds not only of camaraderie but also of popular power. While immobility beyond the church's walls is still the rule, inside its walls there must be a different world—one of active participation, assemblies, resistance—and a new membership, where the marginality imposed by the border regime is refused and dismantled.

While Ana warned us about the potential inefficacy of sanctuary to generate such emancipatory spaces, she also highlighted how the strategy of accompaniment stays true to the normative foundations of border solidarity: the possibility of simultaneously inhabiting two worlds, both the institutional corridors of immigration enforcement and a collective space of freedom, as fragile and provisional as it may be. Here, Gago's rendering of Rita Segato's concept of the body-territory is apposite. She describes how feminist social movements overcome a continuum of exploitation and expropriation of bodies that operate through enclosure and the gendered division of private and public spaces: “The body-territory is a practical concept that demonstrates how the exploitation of common, community territories involves the violation of the body of each person, as well as the collective body, through dispossession.”⁶⁴ While Gago is referring to the continuum of exploitation and dispossession created by heteropatriarchal capitalism, the analogy with border regimes is clear: these, too, involve mechanisms for filtering mobility, as in offshore detention facilities, checkpoints, waiting zones. But they also include forms of differential inclusion in the national territory: criminalized inclusion, incarceration, biometric surveillance, precarious labor. The notion of the body-territory therefore exceeds an analytics of oppression centered on the individual, “decentering the individual as the privileged space of dispossession”⁶⁵ and avoiding an interpretation of systemic oppression where the individual's experience stands as a total representation of the complete spectrum of oppression. Rather, “one has a body-territory in the sense that one is part of a body-territory, not in the sense of property or possession” but as “recognition of the interdependence that shapes us” or “the fate that we share.”⁶⁶

Conclusion

Seeing border struggles from within allows us to go beyond the prevailing frameworks of methodological nationalism that establish a rigid limitation of the demos by the community of citizens and to understand that the foundations of border solidarity rely neither on a moral feeling of empathy nor on a shared social identity or shared experience of oppression. Border solidarity, defined as a practice of collective resistance against border regimes enacted by heterogeneously composed coalitions, cannot remain within the confines of hegemonic understandings of community. Border solidarity is a praxis of resistance that creates a bond that extends beyond the legally institutionalized connections among citizens. As Celikates argues,

Border solidarity calls not just for inclusion but for the radical transformation of bordering practices, and it leads to the formation of a counterhegemonic civic bond between migrants,⁶⁸ people on the move, and citizens. It encourages an understanding of how our fates are connected not through providence, shared oppression, or shared humanity but rather through a differentially experienced web of mobility control, criminalization, and legitimation “that allows neoliberalism to persist.”⁶⁹

That is, the normativity of border solidarity is articulated through a bond of interdependence that operates not through sameness but through difference. This bond, however, is not immediately given to consciousness not only because, as I argued above, the individual experience of oppression and dispossession finds its justification in social practices and institutions but also because it does not account, by itself, for the systemic character of oppression. This bond of interdependence is collectively recognized and articulated only through the work of coming together, forming assemblies, protesting, forging alliances, learning from one another, creating networks of support and political strategies with an emancipatory purpose. That is, solidarity arises out of collective action and is itself a form of collective action. While this may seem like an elliptical definition, it is not—because these are forms of collective action and organization that operate at different levels and also because acknowledging the differentially experienced bond of “interdependence that shapes us,” while morally compelling, does not guarantee that the solidaristic alliance will succeed in accomplishing its emancipatory goal.⁷⁰ In the case of border solidarity, transversality, while a central feature of border struggles, does not guarantee that border solidarity does not fall into regressive tendencies, failing in its purpose, as Ana noted. What is exceptional about border solidarity is its way of creating new spaces of popular sovereignty, going beyond the paradigm of institutionalized citizenship (without falling into a naive conception of postnational global order) and reimagining territory. Rather than disassociating itself from the hegemonic political community through a simple rejection of local territorial administration, border solidarity, in order to achieve its aim, must be a disobedient collective practice of carving out new territories within and in defiance of hegemonic ones, instituting the legitimacy of claims made by those who do not officially count as members of the demos. Thus border solidarity not only demands the abolition of border regimes as they currently operate; it also prefigures new constituencies and new territories that, though fragile and provisional, show us a world that could be.

Notes

Works Cited