President Trump’s Moving Targets

I was at the US Embassy in Mexico City getting my student visa when the Twin Towers collapsed in New York. The procedure was a half-day affair. Hundreds of applicants had a mass appointment at 6 a.m., and we spent the next six or seven hours inside a warehouse attached to the embassy, standing in lines and being photographed, interviewed, and processed. I only found out about the towers around 3 p.m., when I got home and found my mother in tears and my family recommending that I not travel. Eager for the independence that graduate school promised, I arrived in Los Angeles on September 18, 2001, to start a PhD program in anthropology. I flew with three other passengers on an otherwise empty airplane. We all sat silently in the first row, eyeing one another occasionally. Two weeks into the quarter, all international students were required to attend a meeting, with the warning that whoever did not show up would find their affiliation with UCLA terminated. We were told to bring our visas and passports, which were confiscated at the door. We were told that we were presumed terrorists, that visas would be reprocessed under the new Homeland Security Act, our telephones and e-mail accounts placed under surveillance, and passports returned when it was deemed appropriate. I walked out of the hall a prisoner of state, puzzling over the horizon of possibility that had pushed a well-institutionalized state to madness. Given the equation of Islam with terrorism that had ensued full blast in American media, and through the political choice of a particular administration, I had been Arabized. Recognizing that my intended doctoral project was irrelevant to the moment, I sought research questions that would allow me to document other imaginaries, other possible pasts and futures of relation to the Arab and Muslim world, which in my Mexican-Honduran childhood and Quaker American adolescence had not been a radical, threatening other but a cousin, a relative of sorts. I was fortunate to be at UCLA, where academic advisers supported my choice and university resources allowed me to train in the field into which I had been reborn. As I learned Arabic and grasped the historiography of the region, fellow Arab, Turkish, Kurdish, and Iranian grad students and I adopted each other enthusiastically. I was told that I laughed like a Turk, that I danced like one, too, and that I would become the new Iraq’s means of recovering Andalusia. For roommates I had three Palestinian Arab men whom I jokingly called my four husbands but who were more like brothers. Meanwhile, less fortunate Latinos also taken for “Arabs” or “Muslims” were being killed on the streets of LA.How can this brief sketch of my induction into Middle East studies during the Bush administration help us think about the current moment and its attempts to restrict human mobility into the United States? Why are all citizens of six Muslim majority countries prevented from entering the United States or from leaving it if they are already there, prisoners of state? How does this affect the field of Middle East women’s studies? The present moment has fed on the construction of the Muslim as the post-Soviet “enemy” of American Empire and Fortress Europe since at least 9/11. The recent American presidential campaign and elections shifted the parameters of the conceivable, as a candidate inclined to grab women “by the pussy” was voted into office. The ban is a breach of international relations as we know them. It is a delirious extension of a logic that merges the populist political need to create a scapegoat with the will to exert economic and political power against internal and external others. What is particularly dangerous is that though the ban currently affects citizens of identifiable states that are accused of “not collaborating” with the United States, visa procedures for all nonnationals have already been tightened and restructured. As with the definition of kulaks in Stalin’s Russia or of “undesirables” in eugenics-inspired early twentieth-century legislations curtailing migration, there is no stable content to the president’s targets. Such a ban can be extended to fix and exclude, incarcerate or eliminate all newfound enemies of the state. I read it as continuous with the order to build a wall on the Mexico-US border, mandating an independent country to assume the costs of projected US infrastructure, and the criminalization of Mexican labor migrants in the United States as murderous rapists and Mexicans in Mexico as “bad hombres.” In a world deeply structured by transnational flows of people, commodities, and information, all of these gestures are bound to fail in the control of mobility, but they are already exceptionally successful in fanning violence and inciting confrontation. Though the ban prevents us undesirables from accessing American riches, the misogyny and xenophobia of the current administration also inaugurate opportunities for new solidarities and can help open the center of gravity of our field, helping us provincialize the United States, just as postcolonial scholarship taught us to provincialize Europe.

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