Review: The Paraguay Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Peter Lambert and Andrew Nickson (eds.),...

Book Reviews

Made-from-Bone: Trickster Myths, Mu-sic, and History from the Amazon.Jonathan D. Hill. Urbana: University of

Illinois Press, 2009. 195 pp.

Juan Luis RodrıguezQueens College, CUNY

Inapirrikuli (Made-from-Bone) is a trick-

ster of tremendous imaginative power. He

has helped the creation of the world in

which we exist as well as the world of fu-

ture people, or those unborn. He is not a

god, but he is almost immortal. He con-

ceived a son with his aunt, who was also

the first woman. And, later in life, his son

opened the world as it is today. His brother

became the first owner of the chant. Made-

from-Bone also has the power of clairvoy-

ance, which allows him to defeat his en-

emies and avoid death. And he sacrificed

his own son in a fire not to save human-

ity (like Jesus Christ), but to punish his

son. Made-from-Bone is therefore a trick-

ster who defeats his enemies by remaining

one step ahead of their plans and having a

clear picture of the others’ intentions. He

is thus a special type of creator.

The saga of Made-from-Bone is not

just a story. It is history for the Wakuenai

living in the state of Amazonas in South-

ern Venezuela. For them, narratives about

Made-from-Bone are language made ac-

tion in context. Jonathan Hill thus offers

The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 379–413. ISSN 1935-4932, online ISSN

1935-4940. C© 2015 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/jlca.12155

not just a translation of sacred texts, but

an analysis that makes sense of Wakuenai

(Curripaco) narrative as a living genre. He

has organized this analysis into three parts:

“Primordial Times,” “The World Begins,”

and “The World Opens Up.” Each of these

three sections starts with an overview of

the central topics in a set of narratives,

and is then followed by an interlude (one

ethnohistorical and one ethnomusical). In

each of these three sections, Hill elaborates

his analysis of myth, history, musicality,

and power which are the main theoreti-

cal points addressed in the book. The text

ends with an ethnological coda in which

Hill includes his considerations on some

important aspects of current Venezuelan

political history.

The stories about Made-from-Bone

are not a single coherent narrative, but

an assemblage that make sense to those

intricately familiar with Wakuenai oral

traditions. Becoming familiar with these

narratives is usually part of becoming a

ritual specialist such as a malikai liminali

(chant owner) or malirri (shaman). Hill

encountered this speech genre during his

first fieldwork season back in the 1980s and

in subsequent research during the 1990s.

These were times of intense cultural and

political change in southern Venezuela: In

the 1980s, New Tribes missionaries were

intensely proselytizing among indigenous

groups and in the 1990s Venezuela was

Book Reviews 379

going through one of its most intense

20th century political crises. Indigenous

groups in the south were reacting to a

series of changes that included a new

law redistricting Amazonas in favor of

giving more importance to indigenous

votes in local elections. This portended

the transformation of Amazonas into a

full state and the granting of all of its in-

habitants the right to elect their governor.

Back in the 1990s, this aspect of the push

to transform the country into a federal

republic was called descentralizacion.

So what does a research on indigenous

tricksters, verbal art, and music have to do

with these political and cultural changes?

In his attempt to understand Wakuenai

myth as a living genre, Hill finds it

fruitful to trace how traditional narratives

intersect with the political and historical

concerns of the Wakuenai. In addressing

Wakuenai myths, Hill is actually exploring

how a particular aesthetics and poetics

is intrinsic in articulating indigenous

understanding of their place within

broader political structures, such as the

Venezuelan state.

As outlined above, the first part of

the ethnography is dedicated to narra-

tives about the primordial times, or that

moment in which the world has not yet

opened up to its current size and in which

animals and other beings could commu-

nicate with one another with no distinc-

tion. This was a place where gender rela-

tions were not yet established and where

all living things could engage in sex-

ual and social relations with each other.

The primordial world was also a place

of tremendous violence—especially be-

tween kin and affine—and Made-from-

Bone excelled at avoiding the wrath of

others at this early stage of his life. In

this section, Made-from-Bone uses his

abilities only to escape and save his own

life.

The second part, “The World Begins,”

includes somewhat less violent narratives.

At this stage, Made-from-Bone is not

trying to save his life, but is more

concerned with acquiring important

things from animals and supernatural

beings for the “new people of the future

world.” Here Made-from-Bone acquires

the night so that people can sleep, he

brings ceremonial dances and chants,

and real people acquire this knowledge

for the future. This is a time in which

the “traditional” Wakuenai world takes

shape. It is also a juncture at which Made-

from-Bone becomes not only responsible

for his own life, but for the creation of

the world. Made-From-Bone has matured

and Wakuenai traditions have taken place.

Real people have populated the world.

In the final section, the “World Opens

Up,” Made-from-Bone and First Woman

(Amaru) conceived a son (Kuwai). Kuwai

grew up hidden until adulthood because

he was the product of a forbidden sexual

relationship. Yet he has a body that is made

of all the elements and things we know

except fire, the only thing that can kill him.

He also knows the sacred chants (malikai)

and can teach them. More importantly,

he has the power to open up the world by

naming it. This power is essential to un-

derstanding how the current world came

to be. And it is in this process of opening

up the world that we start encountering

places and modern things that did not

exist before. These include cities such as

Puerto Ayacucho and Caracas, from which

desirable things come, and where people

start holding political influence over the

Wakuenai. The mythical world thus goes

from undifferentiated beginnings to an

explanation of how the modern world was

380 J o u r n a l o f L a t i n A m e r i c a n a n d C a r i b b e a n A n t h r o p o l o g y

formed. In this transition, a picture arises

of how the Wakuenai see their standing in

this complex history.

Made-from-Bone belongs to a grow-

ing and important trend in Amazo-

nian ethnology that privileges indige-

nous voice and interpretation. It at-

tempts to give Wakuenai verbal art a

place in the history of the Orinoco and

Amazonia. It thus stands with works such

as the Janet Hendrick’s (1993) To Drink

of Death: The Narrative of a Shuar War-

rior, Marc de Civrieux’s (1997) Watunna:

An Orinoco Creation Cycle, Ellen Basso’s

(1987) In Favor of Deceit: A Study of

Tricksters in an Amazonian Society, or,

more recently, David Kopenawa and Bruce

Albert’s (2013) The Falling Sky: Words of

a Yanomami Shaman. Hill engages in a

process of collaborative ethnopoetics that

changes the positioning of the ethnogra-

pher as privileged interpreter in order to

follow how the Wakuenai themselves con-

ceive the world as an unending process of

transformation in preparation for, as the

Wakuenai would put it, “the new people

of the future world.”

Queen for a Day: Transformistas, BeautyQueens, and the Performance of Fem-ininity in Venezuela. Marcia Ochoa,

Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.

Adriana Garriga-LopezKalamazoo College

Queen for a Day is an ethnographer’s

ethnography. This beautifully written, in-

depth study of the performance of femi-

ninity in Venezuela successfully addresses

multiple audiences simultaneously while

making major contributions to important

debates in anthropology, queer and de-

colonial feminism, performance studies,

and Latin American studies.

Ochoa’s ethnography is based on re-

search conducted among two groups,

cisgender female beauty queens participat-

ing in pageants and transgender women

known locally as transformistas, many

of whom are sex workers. Ochoa pro-

ceeds from this felicitous and forward

thinking equivalence of significance af-

forded to trans- and cis-gendered women

who engage in the performance of fem-

ininity for both work and as a medi-

ation of selfhood and identity. Indeed,

this is one of Ochoa’s best concep-

tualized foundations—in her analysis,

there is hardly any difference between

the beauty queens’ (the “misses”) sani-

tized performance of citizenship, and the

aspirational quality for the transformistas’

self-fashioning through glamour. Ochoa

argues that both “misses” and transformis-

tas are “producing femininities with sim-

ilar symbolic resources, in dialogue with

shared discourses, and employing similar

kinds of techniques and technologies” and

that they “both produce their femininities

in the discursive context of national fem-

ininity in Venezuela,” which, crucially, is

internationally positioned as a beauty fac-

tory (5). This allows Ochoa to dispense

with a perfunctory repetition of the claim

that trans women’s lives matter.

Instead, Ochoa moves on with her

analysis without a bio-determinist teleo-

logical framework for understanding dif-

ferent women’s lives. Indeed, this savvy

move allows Ochoa to focus on the per-

formance of both “everyday” and “spec-

tacular” forms of femininity by both

trans- and cis-gendered women. In the

context of a normative feminism that dis-

avows trans women and might be con-

siderably predisposed to think of beauty

queens as victims of ideology, Ochoa’s

ethnographic treatment of the women’s

Book Reviews 381

performative engagements with feminin-

ity as a symbolic universe is refreshingly

streamlined and respectful. This is impor-

tant not only ethically, but also because it

allows Ochoa to see resistance and em-

powerment in these performances of fem-

ininity and beauty, even while very clearly

stating “glamour is not redemptive; it will

not save you” (89).

This clear-sighted and carefully

crafted ethnography also builds a complex

and beautifully layered argument about

the spaces of the city. The avenue, pedes-

trian bridges, plazas, and sidewalks, as

well as the transit of gendered bodies

through urban spaces are considered as

mediatized stages for the self-production

of marginal feminine subjects, where the

highway overpass melds with the high

fashion runway to refigure the catwalk as a

dance with death, a kind of limbo with licit

and illicit desires. The analytical direction-

ality Ochoa mobilizes is not linear, but, in-

stead, meandering, and it produces a cer-

tain sexualized map of the city of Cara-

cas through repeated encounters with sub-

jects who negotiate its dangers in order to

generate spaces of belonging, income, and

agentive self-production. In this way, the

street and the runway in Ochoa’s ethnog-

raphy can and sometimes do become

spaces of liberation, even while suffused

with routine sexual and class violence, and

many forms of heteropatriarchal domi-

nation, including pervasive victimization

by police, clients, beauty consultants, and

other agents of normative power.

Ochoa’s ethnography speaks to schol-

ars of media through her consideration of

the everyday appropriations of both tech-

nology and digital subjectivities, as well as

subjective engagements with the mediati-

zation of experience. The text should also

be of interest to scholars seeking ethno-

graphic treatments of and engagements

with intersectional analysis of sex work

and decolonial feminism. As an ethnogra-

phy of transnational beauty pageant cul-

ture and as an argument situated as a

“queer diasporic ethnography,” this text is

unique in its location in a Latin American

context (13). Ochoa makes no apologies

for her intersectional frame, which insists

on a thorough and integrated treatment

of the questions of blackness and indi-

geneity, not separately from, but instead

sustained alongside and through powerful

genderqueer analysis. The text also con-

tributes to a growing literature on global

queer communities and subaltern sur-

vival. Ochoa’s lyrical and poetic style does

justice to her literary influences and pays

homage to her mentors, Sandra Cisneros,

Ruth Behar, and Renato Rosaldo, among

others. Their influence is noticeable in her

authorial style, which makes the text a

pleasure to read, even while it mobilizes

several different authorial voices.

One of Ochoa’s major theoretical

contributions involves performance stud-

ies and the theorization of performativ-

ity in everyday life: She very carefully

takes aim at none other than Judith But-

ler’s theorization of performativity, argu-

ing that it reduces the expressive capacities

of embodiment to mere text, relying on a

“logocentric framework” (219). This is a

major intervention into scholarly debates

on performance and performativity, which

Ochoa conducts from the meaty center

of her ethnographic engagement. In this

way, she works to undo the limits of per-

formance as an analytic for rendering the

fullness of social experience. Yet Ochoa

also builds productively on Butler’s work

and on Michael Warner’s theorization

of queer publics in order to understand

phenomenologically how performance


blurs the boundaries between “words and

flesh” (219). This section of the book is

particularly exciting and signals the ap-

pearance of a fresh and powerful voice

with a novel approach to the field of per-

formance studies from squarely within an-

thropology.

Ultimately, “Queen for a Day” is a con-

sideration of some of the most salient con-

tradictions of contemporary Venezuelan

society. Ochoa effectively renders an im-

age of Venezuelan national identity that

is predicated on female bodies as the ev-

identiary repositories of modernity, for

both conservative and socially progressive

projects. How feminized subjects nego-

tiate, transact, and mobilize the cultural

meanings and economic implications of

embodiment speaks to the complex and

even paradoxical realities of the Venezue-

lan revolutionary project. Ochoa in this re-

gard is particularly adept at “staying with

the trouble” (as Donna Haraway would

have it), such that the regimes of em-

bodiment and labor that are embedded

in both revolutionary ideology and stan-

dards of beauty become visible through

her queer ethnographic lens. The book

represents a major contribution to anthro-

pology, queer theory, feminism, scholar-

ship on sex work, media studies, transna-

tional culture, urban ethnography, leftist

history, and Latin American studies.

Elusive Unity: Factionalism and theLimits of Identity Politics in Yucatan.Fernando Armstrong-Fumero, Boulder:

University of Colorado Press, 2013.

203 pp.

Paul M. WorleyWestern Carolina University

Riding the tensions along and between es-

sentialist and constructivist formations of

identity, Cultural and Areas Studies would

seem to stake uneasy claims as fields of

knowledge attached to the territories their

names delineate. Meanwhile, and taking

for granted the ontological unity of the re-

gions, persons, and cultures they describe,

fields with names such as “American Stud-

ies” or “Latin American Studies” capably

acknowledge diverse, even contradictory

manifestations of identity among the

actors within them. This also means claim-

ing these actors and their cultural pro-

duction ipso facto, regardless of whether

or not actors would themselves agree

with such inclusion. That is, in many

cases these fields may enact an imagined

kind of unity of limited relevance to the

people they “study.” In many ways, coun-

terpoints to these academic formations—

or so-called minority studies fields such as

Latin@ Studies, LGBTQ Studies, African-

American Studies, Native American Stud-

ies, and Indigenous Studies—highlight

the intellectual sleights of hand of

these disciplinary operations. “Whose

American/Latin American Studies?” thus

initiates a powerful line of questioning that

contests such assumed unities.

And yet, as Fernando Armstrong-

Fumero’s Elusive Unity: Factionalism and

the Limits of Identity Politics in Yucatan am-

ply demonstrates, in a similar fashion the

unities that academic, political, and cul-

tural discourses articulate with regard to

a field like Indigenous Studies are no less

fraught than those of larger disciplinary

constructs as these unifying characteris-

tic may similarly dissolve upon closer in-

spection and engagement with indigenous

actors. With regard to Maya identity in

Yucatan, Mexico, for example, he notes

that “the concept of ‘Maya Indian’ has no

simple cognate in maya t’aan” (i.e., the Yu-

catec Maya language), going on to describe

how the Maya terms frequently used to

Book Reviews 383

construct the indigenous/nonindigenous

binary in many academic settings,

maasewal and ts’ul, in fact paint a

more complex picture as they also con-

note poverty and those “who have culti-

vated urban habits and speech,” respec-

tively (7). Further complicating matters

is the fact that mestizo, which in most

of Mexico refers to a mixed-race sub-

ject, in Yucatan refers to people who

in most other contexts would be seen

as indigenous. These disjunctures are

felt acutely in regions like those where

Armstrong-Fumero’s study takes place, the

Eastern part of Yucatan state, or Oriente.

There, local, regional, national, and in-

ternational discourses on identity overlap

in a dizzyingly ambiguous field where, as

Armstrong-Fumero convincingly articu-

lates, notions of belonging are perpetually

open to negotiation.

The most appealing, challenging ar-

guments that unify Elusive Unity’s eight

chapters involve the assertion that iden-

tity politics is far muddier than often

portrayed in academic literature, and

that markers of ethnic identity in one

part of the Maya area (Yucatan, Chiapas,

Guatemala, Belize, Honduras) may not,

indeed, have sway elsewhere. The au-

thor’s perspective therefore contributes to

and complicates a good deal of academic

and activist literature on the transnational

Maya movement. To relate but one exam-

ple of these different markers, Armstrong-

Fumero notes how Tzotzil speakers in

Zinacantan and San Juan Chamula,

Chiapas, construct cycles that link com-

munity members, the landscape, and local

shrines “to events that took place at the

time of creation” (33). Conversely, when

asked about times of creation in Yucatan,

his informants “almost inevitably refer to

the creation of new settlements in the early

twentieth century, the granting of collec-

tive title to ejido lands, and the foundation

of schools” (33). Beyond mere regional

variation, this key difference in local nar-

ratives highlights the role that states often

play in constructions of identity. In the

case of Yucatan specifically there has been

a shift from interpellating these actors as

“peasants” during land reforms beginning

in the 1920s (23) to “Mayas” during the

era of neolibeal multiculturalism (162).

As Armstrong-Fumero makes clear, the

class tensions that emerged and presented

challenges to class solidarity almost one

hundred years ago are reconfigured at

present, as “the everyday politics of Maya

culture in rural Oriente seems to be repro-

ducing the ambivalence of earlier collective

labels” (162).

Of note here are the uneven mate-

rial outcomes of neoliberal multicultur-

alism itself (163), as well as the extent

to which those recognized by the state

as “Maya” potentially exclude other it-

erations of Mayaness. Two examples of

this would be the uneasy relationship

some local communities have with state-

sanctioned events and language policies

(168) and how Maya entrepreneurs are

seen as incapable of “embody[ing] the

markers of ‘authentic’ indigeneity” (173).

This is not a matter of discrediting those

Maya who work with the state nor of

blindly celebrating those who do not.

Rather, Armstrong-Fumero’s work calls

upon us to examine in closer detail the re-

lationships that indigenous communities

have with their respective states and to do

a better job of hearing indigenous histories

rather than reframing them according to

our own expectations.

In short, Elusive Unity offers a fo-

cused, nuanced account of how people

in eastern Yucatan have negotiated and


continue to negotiate notions of identity

with local, national, and international ac-

tors. The adoption of this nonessentialist

lens allows Armstrong-Fumero to explore

the contradictions and ruptures present

among a group of people to whom many

outsiders, from tourists to academics, ca-

sually apply the term “Maya.” As this

would suggest, the book’s basic thesis un-

derscores the difficulties inherent in sub-

altern representation, whether this takes

place in popular media, academic work,

or other forms authored by subaltern ac-

tors themselves as the articulation of such

unities entails the privileging of certain

cultural elements over others and the ob-

fuscation of ongoing conflicts within the

group itself.

Overall, Armstrong-Fumero’s ethno-

graphy is an important, welcome addition

to the work of other anthropologists and

ethnographers such as Quetzil Castaneda,

Juan Castillo Cocom, Shannan Mattiace,

and Wolfgang Gabbert, whose ground-

breaking work on Yucatan and Yucatec

Maya communities challenges and com-

plicates how academics think about in-

digenous actors and construct their fields

of study. While Elusive Unity may be seen

as aimed at specialists, its engagement

with indigenous terms of identity and its

grounding in Yucatec Maya material re-

alities cuts across disciplines and should

prove valuable to a wide range of readers

concerned with indigeneity, identity poli-

tics, and community formation.

Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dicta-torship in Guatemala. Kirsten Weld, Dur-

ham: Duke University Press, 2014. 352 pp.

Oscar Pedraza VargasCUNY Graduate Center

Human rights organizations through-

out Latin America seem obsessed with

archives. For such groups, archival infor-

mation typically stands as a treasured re-

source in the struggle against impunity

and a pivotal tool for justice and transfor-

mation. However, the particular role that

archives play in human rights struggles has

not necessarily been of interest for schol-

ars in Latin America; and this is precisely

the reason why Paper Cadavers is such a

relevant work.

By focusing on the Police Archive

uncovered in 2005 in Guatemala City—

a fortuitous finding in the midst of tri-

als and public debates around political

violence, Kirsten Weld resists the stan-

dard temptation to study the impres-

sive amount of data contained in the

documents themselves as possible proof

for justice in a postconflict scenario. In-

stead, she treats the archive as a site of

uncertainty, conflict, drama, knowledge

production, capacity-building, political

debates, dreams, remembrance, hope, and

the haunting presence of death and failure.

For Weld, the archive unfolds into the life

of Guatemala, extending its force to link

in contentious ways different groups from

across the political spectrum, national

and international institutions involved in

the debates about the country´s political

violence.

Weld’s account revolves around more

than the fear or expectation regarding the

data that may be uncovered. She maps in-

stead a war of positions in which the dif-

ferent actors related to the Guatemalan

war struggle to assert in the life of the

country-specific narratives about the past

and the future, as well as the political al-

ternatives that the archive might bring.

Weld thus follows closely the meditations

around history and memory by scholars

such as Trouillot and Stoler, emphasizing

the importance of the political uses of his-

tory, and the interests embedded in the

Book Reviews 385

ways in which the past is articulated in the

public. In that connection, if narrations of

the past are viewed as sites of struggle, then

the documents that enable these accounts,

their arrangements and their material ex-

istence, are crucial in the battlefield of

memory. Hence, Weld analyzes the archive

not simply as a place to catalogue docu-

ments, but as a complex that involves the

transnational networks of human rights,

the expectations, dreams and anxieties of

local organizations, the foreign govern-

ments’ involvement in counterinsurgency,

and the careful and complicated process of

building, organizing, and teaching how to

create an archive that might serve political

purposes in the most effective way.

Weld is a historian, but this work is not

about the archive as a site where informa-

tion could be gathered as some sort of con-

tent. It is an ethnography of the production

of the archive as a political instance, the

contentious and careful process of orga-

nizing that architectonic, and recounting

the impacts of these processes on the lives

of the people involved in such a project.

The account opens with the disputes con-

cerning the archive when it was discovered

and moves to issues surrounding the tech-

nical, political, and administrative com-

plications that accompany the turning of

piles of documents into a legible, trusted,

and politically effective archive. Weld then

moves on to the process by which human

rights activists and ex-guerrilla members

become archivists. This often involves a

confrontation between expectations about

finding a document that might serve in

the legal disputes and the details of the

slow process of organizing, managing, and

taking care of the documents so they be-

come valid and effective in the legal realm.

Weld’s version of this process moves to the

history of police surveillance and inter-

vention in the creation of counterinsur-

gency archives and, finally, discusses the

impact of the archives on former revolu-

tionaries and new generations that face the

Guatemalan past during their work.

The discovery of such an impressive

evidentiary trove detailing “counterin-

surgency” initiatives revitalized struggles

around human rights and political

violence, but more importantly, relocated

the political role of the past in the present

in Guatemala. The controversial results

of the aftermath of war, as well as the

problematic attempts to deflect from the

outcomes of political violence through

silences in the name of democracy in the

millennial present, were challenged by

the materiality of the past in the archives.

At once shocking and undeniable, the

documents that emerged were not easy

to dismiss: Although memory and its

relation to justice may be rather elusive,

abstract and difficult to apprehend (due in

part to the malleability of the pasts that the

very notion of memory evokes), the doc-

uments brought an inescapable material

dimension to debates. This was enhanced

by the practices and methods which gener-

ated a focus on historical and verificatory

expertise, something that granted to the

documents and the archive a status of

objectivity and fact to the events recorded.

This was important to contesting claims

that the sources were being manipulated

by communists or former revolutionaries.

It might be argued that the events

recorded in the massive amount of docu-

ments that compose the archive have the

quality of sparkles of the past that strike,

in different ways, the people and organiza-

tions working in the project. In that sense,

the constitution of an archive and the po-

litical struggles faced by the organizations

come into view as an entwined, active


process of constant redefinition of the

present and the past, as well as the lives

and expectations of those involved in the

project. However, a number of elements

remain to be seen. Weld seems very con-

fident with regard to a general acceptance

of the importance of Guatemalan social

movements in the securing of human

rights, and thus in the legal realm as a form

of transformation. This is certainly true to

an extent, but in the last decade there has

been an emerging critique of the actual

effectivity of human rights discourse: a

rising number of social movements and

organizations related to struggles around

impunity, memory, victimhood, and jus-

tice in Guatemala have put into question

the emphasis on legality while also recon-

sidering the latest results of military pros-

ecutions. Weld does not really take into

account these debates, which are emerging

all over Latin America among groups that

have raised the flag of human rights for

decades. Here Guatemala is not an ex-

ception. But perhaps this underscores her

main point, namely that the archive is in its

weighty materiality not only a contentious

site of antagonistic positions and tenden-

tious claims to objective truths, but a place

where even groups that have been subjects

of political violence may develop new

resources for questioning the ways human

rights and legal struggles have subsumed

other possible forms of political action.

Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruina-tion. Ann Laura Stoler, ed., Durham: Duke

University Press, 2013.

Sean T. MitchellRutgers University, Newark

While reading Ann Stoler’s wide-ranging

edited collection, Imperial Debris, I was

moved again and again to recall the of-

ten circulated quip—variously attributed

to Slavoj Zizek or Fredrick Jameson—

that today it is easier to imagine the end

of the world than the end of capitalism.

This statement is often invoked to cri-

tique the weakness of utopian imagination

among post-Cold War publics in thrall

to cinematic depictions of New York and

Los Angeles’s science fictional ruination,

with those cities standing in as imperial

metonyms for humanity as a whole. Yet

such wording does more than provide a

guide to the metaphors that stand for

critique in the imperial present: In rela-

tion to the series of essays by anthropolo-

gists and historians collected in Imperial

Debris, this diagnostic’s two contrasting

elements—the destruction of sociomate-

rial orders and their creation—emerge as

tightly, and often painfully, linked in a di-

verse array of imperial and postcolonial

settings whose analysis in this edited vol-

ume speaks in important ways to capital-

ism and empire.

In her introduction, Stoler details

how the chapters “ask how empire’s ru-

ins contour and carve through the psy-

chic and material space in which people

live and what compounded layers of im-

perial debris do to them” (2). And she en-

treats ethnographers to consider “‘ruina-

tion’ as an active, ongoing process” (7).

Despite significant diversity of method,

subject matter, and style, the chapters

answer Stoler’s calls in ways that hang to-

gether impressively and push current un-

derstandings of what counts as imperial,

and how scholars might get at those for-

mations. The result is a unique and com-

pelling account of the ways that many

contemporary, human situations are sha-

ped by an ongoing imperial ruination.

Joseph Masco’s contribution histori-

cizes that recurring cinematic destruction

Book Reviews 387

of the U.S. megacities as instances of the

“half century-long project to install and

articulate the nation through contemplat-

ing its violent end” (78). This “ruination

[as a] form of nation building” (252) be-

gan with Cold War-era public enactments

of nuclear destruction and continues to

structure U.S. politics and military inter-

vention abroad. Recall George W. Bush’s

“mushroom-cloud imagery” that drew on

these much rehearsed Cold War-era tropes

and simultaneously opened the doors to

today’s seemingly endless “war on terror”

(278). Rather than a clear contrast between

imagining the end of the world and the end

of capitalism, Masco’s analysis shows how

imagined apocalyptic ruination is consti-

tutive of the militarized form of capital-

ism that the post-Cold War United States

projects around the world.

Many of the people who appear in

these chapters live amid the ruination

brought by assorted capitalist and state

development projects, structured imperial

legacies, and brutal inequalities. John

Collins’s contribution focuses on the

residents of Bahia’s Pelourinho neigh-

borhood: once a colonial command

center, then a red-light district, and

now a UNESCO World Heritage site at

the core of the project to reconfigure a

“‘tradition of the oppressed’ . . . [into]

a possession of the nation and . . . of all

humanity” (168). This international and

state-led project to turn Bahia’s imperial

ruins and associated Afro-Brazilian lives

into national and human “patrimony”

produces violent exclusions and interven-

tions, and is resisted and reinterpreted

by many of the Pelourinho’s residents.

Certain of these citizens and quasi-citizens

subject to UNESCO and Bahian state

imperatives—actors whom Collins dubs

“properly historical subjects”—grasp hold

of iconoclastic means of understanding

their sedimented imperial presents, some-

thing Collins’s poignant chapter entreats

us all to emulate in analyzing inequalities

in a variety of locations. The concluding

chapter, by Vyjayanthi Rao, considers the

lives of the people from a now-underwater

region of Andhra Pradesh, flooded with

the building of a massive dam. They

are among the nearly 35 million people

displaced by such projects since India’s

independence, “a stepping-stone to ‘de-

velopment’ and ‘progress’” (290). Sharad

Chari’s analysis of life in Wentworth, in

Durban—where residents’ health, liveli-

hoods, and environment have undergone

ruination because of proximity to an oil

refinery—is a sophisticated inquiry into

biopolitics and the formation of political

consciousness amid ruination that

generates distant wealth and proximate

misery. Ariella Azoulay’s striking essay

shows how the destruction and erasure

of Palestinian homes and lives is rendered

invisible to Israelis. Destruction is

“naturalized through categories—such as

‘ruins’ . . . [and] the massive justification

and intimidation mechanisms of the

‘security’ kind” (215).

The collection’s chapters that rely

more on historical than ethnographic

methods also tie histories of imperial

ruination to the politics of the present.

Gaston Gordillo traces the “lost” ruins

of a 16th century Spanish town in the

Argentine Chaco. The outpost was lost

first to “insurrection,” and then to the

Chaco’s resistance to incorporation

into Spanish and Argentine imperial

geographies (228). It became a key object

in colonial and postcolonial struggles

against a Latin American “barbarism”

counterposed to metropolitan and

urban “civilization” (243). The eventual


incorporation of the region and ruins of

the “lost” town as part of late 19th century

Argentine nation-state consolidation,

brought only an immiserating “capitalist

looting” (243). Nancy Rose Hunt’s essay

also investigates the intersections of

colonial remnants and contemporary

violence. She takes up common modes of

interpretation and circulation of “shock

photos” of Leopold’s Congo to critique an

“absence of historicization within today’s

humanitarianism” (40). She also deploys

an imaginative aural method for the

interpretation of historical photographs

“to complement and complicate the

overpowering tenacity of the visual” (48)

that dominates interpretation of colonial

and postcolonial violence in the region.

E. Valentine Daniel’s chapter also aims

at methodological innovation. Given the

difficulty of writing a “documental and

chronologized history” (68) of tea estates

on the island now known as Sri Lanka, and

on which Tamil speakers toiled, Daniel

chronicles life and death in verse. Although

not a piece of “chronologized history,” the

poem is a powerful rejoinder to tourist

brochures that “deceptively” render this

“imperial debris” as “tea gardens” (71). It

is also a remarkable attempt to give voice

to injury without turning back to the

epistemological violence that arises from

and mimics ongoing colonial exclusion.

Greg Grandin’s chapter brings many

of the volume’s threads together in its ex-

ploration of the international relations be-

tween forms of imperial debris. Grandin

connects the ruins of the Fordist high-

wage industrial utopia of Detroit to that

of the failed Amazonian rubber planta-

tion modeled in its image, and thus to the

low-wage industrial assembly economy of

contemporary Manaus. He suggests omi-

nously that long after imperial Fordism

has been reduced to ruins, the United

States “has opted to skip the ‘creative con-

struction’ phase of capitalism and jump

to something that might be called ‘per-

manent creative destruction’” (115). This

brings readers back to the connections

between ruination and the imperial pol-

itics of the present, which in this welcome

volume receive rare and insightful treat-

ment from the assembled ethnographi-

cally inclined historians and historically

inclined ethnographers. Imperial Debris is

a thought-provoking, well-organized, and

well-written set of essays that should be

read and drawn upon by any scholars con-

cerned with the ongoing and enduringly

novel effects of imperial ruination.

The Security Archipelago: Human-Security States, Sexuality Politics, andthe End of Neoliberalism. Paul Amar,


328 pp.

Claire PanettaCUNY Graduate Center

In The Security Archipelago, Paul Amar

tracks the rise and spread of the

“human-security state,” a phenomenon he

identifies as a new political formation.

Conceived as an outgrowth of existing se-

curity states in the “Global South,” this

emerging form of governance is born at

the intersection of four seemingly contra-

dictory “logics of securitization.” Amar

describes these four with the terms

“moralistic,” “juridical-personal,” “work-

erist,” and “paramilitary.” He argues that

although historically these logics have op-

erated independently, they have recently

begun to converge in certain contexts as a

result of a shared preoccupation with “hu-

manity,” and a common understanding of

Book Reviews 389

such as having particular connotations of

class, race, gender, sexuality, and morality.

This preoccupation is manifested in a nar-

rative about the need to “rescue” humanity

from a set of perceived “perversions” asso-

ciated with globalization. Included among

these putative perversions are homosex-

uality, sex work, and tourism (6). Amar

shows how this discourse of a threatened

humanity—a local variant of what he calls

the “humanitarian rescue doctrine”—is

mobilized by both state and nonstate ac-

tors in the service of a variety of policies,

programs, and projects. These initiatives

are ostensibly aimed at “saving” and reha-

bilitating certain populations and spaces;

however, as Amar makes clear, the ultimate

concern is to justify heightened, more mil-

itarized interventions in local, urban con-

texts. These interventions are themselves

intended to regulate certain forms of be-

havior and impose particular moral and

sexual codes of conduct.

Amar bookends his argument with an

introduction that maps the contours of

the human-security state and a conclusion

that engages the question of whether or

not the era of “neoliberalism”—as both

an analytical category and a set of hege-

monic political and economic practices—

has come to an end. In the middle are six

chapters devoted to a series of case stud-

ies in Egypt and Brazil. Amar explains that

he has chosen to focus on these countries

because of shared “structural factors” and

“sociohistorical trends” (27). For example,

he notes that they are both geopolitically

significant oil and gas producers. More-

over, their recent histories have both been

marked by the involvement of the armed

forces in political life and the police in

civic life (28). In addition, however, Amar

wants to highlight the recent political and

economic alliance forged between the two

countries—and between the Middle East

and Latin America more generally. Mani-

fested in a series of “bilateral agreements

and partnerships,” the connections be-

ing fostered between these regions, he ar-

gues, have facilitated the circulation of ide-

ologies, policies, and programs associated

with the human-security state. This move-

ment of ideas and practices links these and

other countries together in what Amar de-

scribes as an “archipelago of hotspots” in a

zone once known as the “semiperiphery,”

a term coined by development theorists to

refer to countries occupying ambiguous

political and economic spaces between the

“center” and the “periphery” (245).

Tacking between Cairo and Rio de

Janeiro, Amar explores a range of ini-

tiatives and events he considers salient

to his elaboration of the human-security

state. These include the policing of neigh-

borhoods in Rio traditionally associated

with prostitution and the Egyptian gov-

ernment’s prosecution of the “Cairo 52,” a

group of so-called “gay debauchers” who

were arrested in a police raid on a Cairo

nightclub. They also include urban de-

velopment plans for cultural heritage in

“Islamic Cairo” aimed at re-spatializing

gender relations and a state-sponsored

program in one of Rio’s favelas designed

to redevelop the area for tourism as the

“cradle of samba.” And finally, they in-

clude police raids to stop transnational sex

trafficking and child prostitution in Rio

and movements related to sexual harass-

ment against women in Egypt in the wake

of the January 25th Revolution. Each case

study is unique, but according to Amar,

they share common ground in that all

of the interventions aim to regulate ur-

ban spaces and the activities occurring in

them as well as the kinds of individuals

(i.e., those conforming to certain norms


of sexual and moral behavior) who have

access to them. In addition, they are all ex-

amples of initiatives developed and imple-

mented by a shifting constellation of state

and nonstate actors—or what Amar refers

to as “parastatal formations.” As he ex-

plains, parastatals are “coalitions that can

include government policymakers, NGOs,

private-security agencies, morality cam-

paigns, and property developers,” and they

represent one of the defining features of

the human-security state (18).

Parastatal formations are significant

because they reflect different configura-

tions of actors than those found in “ne-

oliberal projects.” This distinction points

to one of Amar’s overarching concerns—

namely, the calibrated positioning of the

human-security state in contradistinction

to the “neoliberal state.” He argues that,

while human-security states can be un-

derstood as products of the contradictions

inherent in “global neoliberalism,” they

are fundamentally different from the po-

litical formations traditionally associated

with such (236). Whereas neoliberalism, in

Amar’s view, is engaged with processes and

subjectivities oriented around “liberalism,

competitive marketization, and economic

individualism,” the human-security state

is more concerned with processes of se-

curitization as they relate to the produc-

tion of “subjects of morality, gender, sex-

uality, race, policing, and space-making in

the Global South” (100). Amar’s objec-

tive here is to challenge the idea that the

“Global North” and the forms of neolib-

eral governance associated with it are the

source of all contemporary political for-

mations. Instead, he wants to argue that

countries in the Global South represent

“laboratories” for the development and

circulation of alternative forms of political

economy and governance. In turn, these

alternatives index the ascendance of a new

political order and, in this respect, they

gesture at the “end of neoliberalism” as a

hegemonic idiom and political formation.

Amar’s argument about forms of gov-

ernmentality developing in and circulating

between the countries of the Global South

is sound, and it is important to alert read-

ers to the multidirectional flow of politi-

cal formations, ideologies, and practices,

which is so often forgotten in metropoli-

tan theorizations. However, there are two

points of critique to be made in this con-

text. To begin, in his desire to displace the

Global North from the center of narra-

tives about the origins and spread of forms

of governance, Amar has perhaps gone

too far in the opposite direction. Rather

than arguing that the human-security state

originated in the Global South while the

neoliberal state originated in the Global

North, would it not be more analytically

productive to explore the ways in which

they are mutually constituting? That is

to say, how are political formations born

of “neoliberal ideology” underpinned by

ideas and practices originating in both the

Global North and the Global South? Con-

versely, is it not more accurate to think

about the ways in which human-security

states are born of processes originating

in both locations? Such an orientation,

and understanding of global interconnect-

edness, has already been articulated by

Brazilian theorists of liberalism and na-

tionalism, among them Emilia Viotti da

Costa and Roberto Schwarz.

Second, the ethnographic data do

not quite capture the kinds of move-

ment on which Amar bases his conclu-

sions. For example, in a chapter look-

ing at a series of UN summits recently

held in Brazil and Egypt, Amar proposes

that humanitarian ideologies and practices

Book Reviews 391

flowed not from the summits to the local

contexts, but in the reverse direction: local

events surrounding the summits informed

the outcomes of the meetings themselves.

He therefore concludes that securitization

processes developed in Brazil and Egypt

“jumped scale to the UN level” (64). Sim-

ilarly, in his explanation of the sociohis-

torical connections between Latin Amer-

ica and the Middle East, he notes a series

of “megasummits” held at the end of the

last century that worked to bind the two

regions together both politically and eco-

nomically. In turn, this binding has facili-

tated the spread of various components of

the human-security state. Although Amar

is persuasive in establishing these connec-

tions, and many readers will no doubt be

sympathetic to his desire to recognize the

Global South’s contributions to political

economy, the exact process of “transferal”

remains somewhat unclear. How did the

forms of securitization associated with the

human-security state “jump scale?” How

precisely did these megasummits facilitate

the circulation of ideas and practices re-

lated to such?

More generally, there are times when

it feels as though Amar is trying to nego-

tiate too much material. His ethnographic

data cover a dizzying spectrum of projects,

people, organizations, and events, and

while this gives his work remarkable

breadth, it also necessitates the sacrifice

of some depth and, perhaps, clarity.

This has two, seemingly contradictory,

negative consequences. On the one hand,

by covering so much terrain Amar is

unable to explore the particularities of the

phenomena he is describing. Moreover,

the scope of the text does not permit a real

engagement with history—particularly

that which pertains to liberal and ne-

oliberal exchange between and among

world regions. This, of course, enables

him to construct a fairly seamless set of

linkages between disparate people, places,

and events; however, scholars may be

uncomfortable with such neat, ahistorical

packaging. Anthropologists, in particular,

traffic in idiosyncrasy and contingency,

and there is frankly a discomfiting absence

of such in the text. On the other hand,

there are moments when the connections

feel somewhat forced or underdeveloped.

Ironically, perhaps focusing on a smaller

set of practices, issues, or phenomena,

exploring them in greater detail, and then

letting the specifics of this material sit—

even if uneasily—side by side, might have

made for a more convincing argument.

These comments aside, this is an am-

bitious text, and one that offers much for

scholars to work with and on which they

may build. Amar has articulated a genera-

tive framework for thinking about the ways

in which political formations develop and

spread. Furthermore, he has linked a vari-

ety of social, cultural, and economic phe-

nomena to processes of governance and se-

curitization in novel ways that may be pro-

ductively mobilized in future scholarship.

Freedom Time: Negritude, Decoloniza-tion and the Future of the World.Gary Wilder, Durham, NC: Duke Uni-

versity Press, 2015. 400 pp.

Massimiliano TombaUniversity of Padua

Freedom Time is an important book. It is

also exceptionally scholarly and extremely

readable. Such qualities rarely inhere in a

single text. And they are rarely bundled

into an analysis so passionate and timely

that excavates past attempts at human


emancipation in order to reveal new path-

ways into modernization. And, as Wilder

makes clear, these attempts might allow

us to reopen past possibilities related to

efforts at liberation and redirect them at

a potentially shared present and future.

Freedom Time is thus timely in many ways.

This is true also because it faces the current

crisis of representative democracy from

the perspective of globalization, taken as

the condition for rethinking the meaning

of democracy and freedom as well as more

standard approaches to the categories of

space and time through which we are ac-

customed to representing reality.

Wilder’s argument is about “‘the

problem of freedom’ after the end of

empire,” a term he borrows explicitly from

the expression “the problem of freedom”

as enunciated by the historian of the

British Empire, Thomas Holt. But Wilder’s

focus is the French Empire, even as his

scholarship moves beyond the geographi-

cal, political, and theoretical borders of an

imperial France. Wilder accomplishes this

by following the politics and thought of

Aime Cesaire and Leopold Senghor. Com-

bining Cesaire and Senghor with Walter

Benjamin, Albert Camus, and John Dewey,

among others, he thus engages the differ-

ent temporalities of decolonization and

the ways these reshape the world. Wilder

thus focuses on the conceptual frame that

allows him to think a diversity of temporal

strata in the global present and this multi-

temporal paradigm ties in fascinating ways

into the political problem of freedom.

Wilder suggests that the two concepts

that make up his title Freedom and Time are

strictly related. That is, one cannot rethink

freedom without questioning the unilin-

ear conception of time. And, in a related

vein, questioning historical time is a polit-

ical gesture.

Freedom Time “explores how French

imperialism created conditions for an al-

ternative federal democracy that might

have been” (5). In other words, imperi-

alism and globalization constitute condi-

tions of possibility for the global optic

that is necessary today for grasping de-

colonization as a restructuring process.

Or, put slightly differently, the perspec-

tive from which we enunciate positions is

always spatially and temporally situated,

but something called “globalization” is the

condition that makes possible an overcom-

ing of the provincialism of both space and

time. Wilder thus draws on hypothetical

phrasings—“might have been”—in order

to make past possibilities present in a new

constellation developed masterfully in his

text. From this perspective, decolonization

was (and is) not a linear process of lib-

eration through a necessary stage called

the nation-state. Rather, decolonization

opened many trajectories, some of which

were taken, and others hindered or re-

pressed.

Thinking along with Cesaire and Sen-

ghor, Wilder works through the semantic

spectrum of the word “decolonization.”

Here decolonization appears not as the

contrary of colonization, nor a neat

attempt to follow the Western path of civ-

ilization and self-determination through

state sovereignty, but a third possibility be-

yond the frame of this binary opposition.

This is “federal democracy.” It would be

wrong to understand “federal democracy”

as an institutional project that has to

be realized. In Wilder’s hands “federal

democracy” refers to a noninstrumental

political practice that reconfigures the rela-

tionship between “political emancipation”

and “human emancipation,” a distinction

made by Marx, who Wilder quotes at the

very beginning of the second chapter while

Book Reviews 393

discussing “the problem of freedom.”

Why Marx? Because Marx himself initiates

a tradition that is worthy to be rethought

in relation to questions that remain open.

Indeed, the “problem of freedom” and

especially postcolonial freedom are still

our problems, since “we do not have the

critical language with which to speak post-

colonial democracy, translocal solidarity,

and cosmopolitan politics in ways that

have not already been instrumentalized

by human rights, humanitarianism, and

liberal internationalism” (xiii).

The alternative of federal democracy

that Wilder sketches out requires new lan-

guage, new concepts, and a new political

practice beyond the imperial juxtaposition

between Western and non-Western. Thus,

the alternative “federal democracy” is not

an institutional project for which one has

to find appropriate technical means nec-

essary to its realization. Insofar as the idea

of federal democracy challenges the con-

ceptual framework of the nation-state and

modern sovereignty, it requires a different

articulation of theory and practice and a

different subject, whose agency expresses

a new politics. In other words, it requires

a new kind of human being. This is the

most difficult issue, from both the theo-

retical and the practical perspective. It is

difficult because of a lack of words ade-

quate to express such a utopian challenge.

Not by chance, then, Wilder points out that

both Cesaire and Senghor resort to poetry.

The courage to think the possible

convergence between political and hu-

man emancipation within a framework

that cannot be entirely translated into

conceptual language exposed Cesaire and

Senghor to many subsequent misinterpre-

taions. Thus, Wilder might also be situ-

ated as ready to be misunderstood as well.

Maybe, even in this review.

I would like to recall what Wilder de-

scribes as Senghor’s “infamous proposi-

tion that ‘emotion is negre as reason is

Hellenic.’” (61) This proposition is “in-

famous” insofar as it dichotomizes emo-

tion and reason according to the distinc-

tion between negre and Hellenic. But one

might approach Senghor’ statement not

from the standpoint of a dichotomy, but

as the expression of the difference and

complementarity between emotion and

reason. And if the West has projected the

dichotomy between reason and emotion

into a racialized counterposition, the nega-

tion of this dichotomy is but an imme-

diate reaction that, as long as it is only

a negation, only relocates the opposition.

Yet, Wilder suggests that Senghor rearticu-

lates the opposition as difference, and thus

he can say that “I feel, therefore I am” (66)

as part of another possible kind of individ-

uation and relationship between humans

and reality. “I feel, therefore I am” is not

opposed to the Western “I think, therefore

I am” and, even less, constitutes an invi-

tation to abandon reason for feeling. It is,

instead, another possibility of the human.

From such a standpoint the “black

soul” should neither embrace European

civilization, nor simply oppose it. For Sen-

ghor, such a “being-black” as concrete ac-

tion might reframe dichotomies into dif-

ferences and, by doing so, help France to

recover from the “deformation to which its

modern evolution has subjected it” (64).

This cultural project turns into a politi-

cal one: meeting their own past possibil-

ities, the African and the European build

bridges between their alternative pathways

and, finally, re-encounter each other as

humans.

According to Wilder, the project

of Tropiques, the journal put together

by Cesaire, was similar: “Rather than


challenge French colonialism from the

perspective of a static Antillean cultural

tradition, or capitalism from the perspec-

tive of an idealized Antillean peasantry,

they criticized the reactionary dimensions

of each tradition from the standpoint of

critical currents internal to that tradition”

(36–7). In the same spirit “Senghor turned

to the European mutualist traditions

in which labor cooperatives, collective

property, social production, and direct

democracy related more to federated as-

sociations of neighbors or coworkers

than to elected representatives” (73). If

African civilization does not follow the

Western pathway of capitalism and state

sovereignty, it might thus encounter and

help the West in its attempt to reopen past

possibilities and tradition.

As I read Cesaire with Senghor, and

think them alongside Wilder, the “black

gift” about which Senghor wrote ap-

pears not to be related to an authentic

and redemptive Africa: for Cesaire, writes

Wilder, “colonialism dehumanized both

perpetrators and victim” (128). The al-

ternative neither lies in the return to an

indigenous authenticity nor to the pre-

colonial past. Instead, according to Wilder,

it concerns a “process of modernization

whereby the communal and democratic

possibilities that inhered Africa civiliza-

tion could be nourished through noncoer-

cive forms of contact with Europe” (129).

Freedom Time helps us to think how

an abstract universal can become a con-

crete combining space and time that su-

persedes both geographical and temporal

provincialism, the task of the “true hu-

manism.” This is not an abstract phrasing,

and it is not only a political task. It is also

a human task that requires a kind of ther-

apy that poetry and poetic knowledge can

offer by recombining feeling and reason

to recover the modern mutilated subject.

However, freedom, as well as the Kantian

exit from the state of immaturity, cannot

be given. They require self-determination.

As Wilder reports from Cesaire, “I have no

ambitions about finding a solution. I do

not know where we are going, but I know

that we must charge ahead. The black man

must be liberated, but he must also be lib-

erated from the liberator” (259).

Reminiscencias dos quilombos: Ter-ritorios da memoria em uma comu-nidade negra rural. Marcelo Moura Mello,

Sao Paulo: Editora Terceiro Nome, 2012.

Camila Camargo VieiraPontifıcia Universidade Catolica

Colleen Scanlan LyonsUniversity of Colorado

O livro Reminiscencias dos Quilombos:

territorios da memoria em uma comuni-

dade negra rural, de Marcelo Moura Mello,

pretende desvelar a problematica dos

quilombos, espacos historicamente invisi-

bilizados, a partir dos relatos etnograficos,

vivencias, e narrativas de mulheres e

homens da Comunidade Negra Rural de

Cambara localizada no estado do Rio

Grande do Sul, no Brasil. A partir dessas

narrativas e reconstruıda a historia dessa

comunidade demarcando esse territorio

como um espaco de vida, resistencia, iden-

tidade e memoria. O autor contribui para

dar visibilidade aos “territorios negros,”

que foram ocultados e esquecidos tanto

pela historiografia como pelas ciencias so-

ciais, com relacao a estrutura fundiaria

dos estados do Sul do paıs. Outro as-

pecto relevante que Mello revela se ref-

ere a metodologia e como se desdobram

as articulacoes entre oralidade, escrita,

tempo, espaco e memoria.

Book Reviews 395

Ha um entrelacamento entre orali-

dade e escrita havendo um dialogo com-

partilhado. Sob essa perspectiva, os docu-

mentos e arquivos escritos ganham sentido

com a vivencia trazida pela oralidade a par-

tir da memoria. A oralidade enriquece com

detalhes ausentes na escrita, alem de trazer

vida e contornos que somente atraves da

memoria e da experiencia vivida podem

ser encontrados. Alem disso, como ressalta

o autor, os documentos escritos estabele-

cem relacoes de poder e somente a per-

spectiva dos dominantes na epoca. Este

aspecto e muito importante de ser men-

cionado, pois com este livro e possıvel se

ter outra visao: a dos dominados atraves de

suas narrativas, dando voz as pessoas que

foram e ainda sao silenciadas na sociedade

brasileira.

Outro aspecto importante e que nas

tessituras da memoria, a oralidade pode

revelar silenciamentos, supressoes, lacunas

que nao existem no documento escrito.

Experiencias inscritas no corpo, na alma

e na mente de quem viveu ou de quem

guarda em suas lembrancas o que out-

ros viveram no passado, seja a “memoria

da escravidao”, a “memoria do cativeiro”,

mas que de alguma forma ainda se rever-

bera no presente. A memoria articula pas-

sado, presente e futuro transpondo tem-

pos e reavivando a historia num ir e vir

continuo estabelecendo conexoes, signifi-

cados e sentidos. Nesse entrelacar Mello

e seus narradores vao tecendo a historia

da comunidade de Cambara propiciando

ao leitor um descortinar de realidades,

historias e experiencias, contribuindo para

uma ampliacao do olhar sobre os quilom-

bos e a populacao negra brasileira.

A etnografia de Mello e dividido em

seis capıtulos. No primeiro capıtulo, ele

mostra historicamente como os quilom-

bos inspiraram movimentos de resistencia

negra desde a primeira metade do

seculo XX, se desenvolvendo ao longo

do tempo ate serem reconhecidos pela

Constituicao brasileira. Sao relevantes os

dados de Mello a respeito do desloca-

mento teorico-conceitual, desde a decada

de 1990 de reivindicacao das proprias co-

munidades, pelo seu reconhecimento en-

quanto quilombos nao mais pautados na

condicao camponesa, mas na condicao

etnica. Dentro dessa perspectiva e signif-

icante que os proprios sujeitos quilom-

bolas construam sua autoidentificacao se

reconhecendo como quilombolas. A et-

nicidade se manifesta no domınio do

polıtico, contribuindo para fortalecer e es-

tabelecer conexoes com as proprias ex-

periencias de vida. No segundo capitulo o

autor propoem que a acao polıtica, pau-

tada pela identidade etnica, ganha out-

ras mobilizacoes dos proprios membros

da comunidade de Cambara, mediante a

memoria. Possibilita-se, desse modo, em-

basar a trajetoria dessa comunidade com

um resgate do passado historico ao mesmo

tempo em que dialoga com o presente.

No entrelacar da memoria, o autor tece

narrativas juntamente com mulheres e

homens de Cambara, num compartilhar

de vozes que coloca suas experiencias, suas

lembrancas e seus silencios significantes.

Mello mostra que atualmente se presen-

ciam trajetorias que nao foram devida-

mente reconhecidas pela narrativa oficial

da nacao e que emergem como “memorias

subterraneas”, marcando outras inscricoes

na polıtica e na historia das comunidades

quilombolas, como e o caso da comu-

nidade de Cambara. Mello, narra que os

moradores de Cambara consideram sig-

nificativo a experiencia de ocupar o ter-

ritorio. A questao do territorio e latente em

grande parte das comunidades quilom-

bolas, pois ha uma disputa e interesses


economicos envolvendo grandes investi-

dores de capital. O territorio nao e so-

mente o espaco fısico, mas tambem o de-

positario de vida, historia, luta, identidade

e ancestralidade.

Nos capıtulos 3 e 4, Mello faz um lev-

antamento do parentesco dos escraviza-

dos, visando compreender relacoes famil-

iares e de apadrinhamento. Na memoria

estao inscritas as relacoes familiares do

grupo, transmitindo a continuidade tem-

poral do lugar e das pessoas que viveram

nesse espaco. Nos ultimos dois capıtulos

do livro, Mello consolida a questao cen-

tral da pesquisa que se refere ao papel as-

sumido pela memoria na dinamica iden-

titaria em Cambara. O autor destaca a

importancia da oralidade, das lembrancas

compartilhadas pelo grupo para elucidar

os documentos escritos. Nessa dimensao,

as narrativas ganham vida e envolvem os

jovens, que rememoram as experiencias

dos antigos, fortalecendo sua identidade

etnica e territorial. O que tambem reper-

cute no etnografo, que participa da

memoria coletiva da comunidade, modif-

icando tanto a experiencia dos narradores

como tambem a do pesquisador.

Este livro promove inovacoes

metodologicas, entrelacando as narrativas

e as lembrancas dos moradores de

Cambara com os arquivos escritos. Pensar

a oralidade para alem da fonte historica

e metodologica proporciona levantar

outras questoes e estabelecer novas

relacoes de conhecimento. Escravizados,

lembrancas, reminiscencias, aparicoes,

injusticas e historias sao mobilizadas e,

ao mesmo tempo, mobilizam aqueles que

recordam. Nesse sentido, ha um processo

de composicao entre memoria, oralidade

e escrita que traz e refaz a historia. Esta

etnografia, ao valorizar os relatos orais

como parte primordial da pesquisa,

traz em sua dinamica uma perspectiva

que se articula com a antropologia pos-

interpretativa, onde os proprios sujeitos

pesquisados dao voz e participam do seu

discurso, enriquecendo e construindo o

texto antropologico. Os relatos orais, para

os quilombolas de Cambara, reafirmam

o direito pelo territorio, que e mais

significativo do que um espaco fısico.

Vozes tanto silenciadas, discriminadas,

ocultadas na historia e que comecam

a clamar por justica, direitos, espaco,

dignidade, respeito, numa assuncao

quilombola nos territorios da memoria.

Secure the Soul: Christian Piety andGang Prevention in Guatemala. Kevin

Lewis O’Neill, Berkeley, CA: University of

California Press, 2015. xi + 288 pp.

Chris GarcesCornell University

Kevin Lewis O’Neill’s latest publication

provides a deeply sensitive ethnogra-

phy of a “postwar” Guatemala in the

crosshairs of regional drug wars and

local permutations of the war on terror.

Grounding his fieldwork in Guatemala

City’s disadvantaged and underserviced

neighborhoods, Secure the Soul follows

life histories of youths who find them-

selves both criminalized and vulnerable

in the city. This subset of young men

was often caught up in the country’s

“soft security” programs—institutions as

diverse as Evangelical churches, interna-

tional call centers, and drug rehabilitation

clinics—which target, enfold, and manage

in a pastoral sense the lives of subjects oth-

erwise susceptible to gang membership.

Soft security efforts move statist agendas

of capitalist development and crime

prevention into the care of various

Book Reviews 397

nonstate actors who attempt to pro-

tect the subject from harm. This is a

fast-emerging paradigm that replaces

“hard” security with a more capillary

emphasis in attending to the local sources

of criminogenic violence and insecurity.

Secure the Soul actively tracks these

shifting modalities, temporalities, and

effects of securitization efforts. In lush

ethnographic detail, O’Neill analyzes how

his born-again Evangelical friends and

informants were inducted within various

“soft security” voluntarism and hourly

wage labor practices, and problematizes

how their Christian ethics of the self was

partly informed by the state’s efforts to

mitigate urban crime and impunity.

In my reading, Secure the Soul marks a

watershed moment not only for students

of Guatemala, but also for Latin American-

ists, scholars of Evangelical Christianity,

and critics of the national security state. I

recently taught the book in my graduate

seminar on “The New Latin American

State,” where all parties to the table were

duly impressed by its exposing of the rela-

tion between Evangelical language and the

temporality of security, the intransigence

of the transnational gang problem, and

the way multiple publics are drawn into

carceral modes of governance. While other

Latin Americanists have explored one or

another of these phenomena, the ethno-

graphic challenge of bringing them to-

gether within a single, book-length frame

has produced a work that should long

remain a touchstone for understanding

contemporary state dynamics. Rather than

focusing in on a single argument that

might leave readers with a facile “take-

away,” O’Neill engages interrelated

phenomena in their proper ethnographic

complexity. Nonetheless, in O’Neill’s view,

the religious practices that undergird

the fraught successes of “soft security”

programs merit our greatest critical

attention and scrutiny.

Talk of (in)security abounds across

the world. But Latin America and the

Caribbean—geographical zones which

redound with projects of imperial fantasy

and control—are an acute example.

O’Neill provides a rich study of the way

security discourse in Guatemala medi-

ates contemporary politics and religion,

and is remediated by them in turn.

The word “security” as it is deployed is

a temporality-bending concept—indexing

a certain orientation to a safe, secure,

or predictable future in a problemati-

cally “fallen” world. Although it is not

considered strictly in politico-theological

terms (whether Agamben’s, Schmitt’s, or

Spinoza’s), “security” in O’Neill’s frame-

work is a secularized theological concept

designed to work on “the soul” of the

political subject. This analytic is a most

welcome intervention into anthropolog-

ical theory, activist projects, and policy-

minded circles alike.

From the early modern, Westphalian

concept indicating the state of one’s ter-

ritorial sovereignty, to the Cold War “se-

curity state” and its military attempts to

neutralize internal and external threats,

to the neoliberal state’s “securitization”

of private capital and its futures, to

the current (post-neoliberal?) emphasis

on “citizen’s security,” and its curious

comingling of police, carceral, cultural,

or neighborhood-level authority, Latin

American peoples now find themselves

part of myriad new bureaucratic exper-

iments. “Soft security” is shot through

with fragments from all these fractured

and Sisyphean projects. As nearly all Latin

Americanists frequently note either in

private, in their published work, or in


their analysis of U.S. or European state dy-

namics as influenced by a Latin American

or Latin Americanist perspective, the re-

gion as a whole runs rampant with crime

and impunity, corrupt police and para-

political actors, criminal justice systems

unaccountable to victims, and forms of

governance that often protect the “inter-

ests” of multinational corporations or state

bureaucratic schemes over those of their

own citizens. To his credit, O’Neill moves

away from the overwhelming pessimism

often characteristic of analyses of this situ-

ation and dedicates nearly all his attention

to young born-again subjects quite often

viewed as a resource for salvific religious

and humanitarian interventions. In par-

ticular, his ethnography refuses to think of

“security” without associating it with par-

ticular faces, or the religious logic to which

their lives have been consigned.

The question “what is the object of se-

curity?” is therefore a temporally bounded

and short-sighted one; the objective life-

worlds of security shift in tandem with

projects of immanence or transcendence,

or the problematic care of the self. An

influential new model of security stud-

ies (out of Copenhagen) would neverthe-

less make this open-ended, secular ques-

tion into a guiding source of critical in-

quiry into the projection and effects of

security discourse, that is, of the process

of “securitization” as such. By contrast,

O’Neill’s ethnography of securitization

efforts’ mimetic and productive effects

across the city demonstrates a grounded

theoretical insight more akin to Foucault’s

“repressive hypothesis”: the proliferation

of speech about security, and the prac-

tices of subjectification unleashed in its

name demonstrate more than multifari-

ous kinds of citizen insecurity or the state’s

mobilizations to protect itself. Rather, the

internationalization and seamless local

adoption of security discourse also signals

how “the soul” of civilian publics has been

interpellated, as pastoral agents now man-

age their own fate and the fate of their

neighbors through novel forms of care. Is

it any wonder that Evangelical Christian-

ity, with its theologies of self-profession

and deep-seated concern with the state

of one’s soul, should map perfectly onto

the newly securitized urban environment?

And I, too, profess: I cannot help but

recall writing graduate papers on Disci-

pline and Punish, a long time ago, and be-

ing chastised for taking up Foucault’s use

of “the soul.” “What is this?” One com-

ment memorably noted with incredulity.

The concept had little or no analytic

purchase. With O’Neill’s ethnographic

work, however, we begin to see the vi-

tal importance of taking ontologies of

soul-craft as seriously as the state, as that

most curious material precinct which se-

curity efforts have seized upon for the

problematic safeguarding and definition

of the self.

Barrio Libre: Criminalizing States andDelinquent Refusals of the New Frontier.Gilberto Rosas, Durham, NC: Duke Uni-

versity Press, 2012. 181 pp.

Emily A. LynchFranklin and Marshall College

Gilberto Rosas explores contemporary

Mexico–U.S. relations in light of neolib-

eral economic reforms on and across both

sides of the border. He seeks to understand

how competing forms of state sovereignty

situated in zones of low-intensity warfare

enforce inequitable social and political

Book Reviews 399

orders in Nogales, a city in the U.S.–

Mexican borderlands. Based on extensive

ethnographic research, Rosas seizes the

sewage tunnel connecting the two nations

as a poignant site for examining how local

youth simultaneously terrorize undoc-

umented migrants as much as they are

terrorized by law enforcement in both

countries. Late neoliberalism, thus Rosas

suggests, dramatically limits, as much

as opens up, the possibilities for new

subjectivities as the youth of Barrio Libre

(the Free ‘Hood) search for “freedoms”

in their various expressions of precarious

delinquency.

Rosas draws on a distinctive ethno-

graphic writing style to describe the oozy,

seeping movements of the abject youth,

their experience of systematic state terror-

ism and violence, and the paradox of small

pleasure and desperation in the everyday

contradictions of their efforts to survive.

His ethnographic vignettes show the raw,

jagged ends of state formations: the bodies

of youth exposed and undone by compet-

ing forms of state sovereignty; youth who

tear and harm other vulnerable lives, at

the same time they utilize the border zone

as a place to be free and exercise control.

The Introduction and Chapter 1 term the

youth of the Barrio Libre’s new frontier

as “nightmares,” to themselves, to others,

and most critically, to state sanctioned

powers who lack appropriate orders and

mechanisms to control their movements.

Rosas arrays his chapters along a

spectrum, starting with the rise of the

new frontier, the increased police state

to monitor and restrict movement across

the border of Nogales, the historical sig-

nificance of criminality emblazoned on

Mexican bodies, and perhaps most inter-

estingly in conclusion, Rosas’ figuration

of the new frontier that comes about as a

challenge to Giorgio Agamben’s formula-

tions of exceptionalism. Rosas argues that

the zone of indistinction between both No-

gales indeed has become normalized, yet

“it has not become the rule” (143). Images

of black sewage, festering stenches, pool-

ing foul water, contaminants, and patho-

logical bodies emerge in Rosas’ opening

pages, inciting and posing a series of

questions about militarized international

borders and the death-producing tech-

nologies emergent in state legitimated

campaigns of sovereignty.

Youth in the Free ‘Hood learn how

to exploit power and neoliberal orders by

dark measures and violent means, ulti-

mately, Rosas argues, to the ends of lethal,

pathologized collective “rites of refusal.”

Youth both deny the neoliberal impulse to

exploit and damage, as they also subject

themselves to death by their own means

and measures, often experienced as a

parallel sequence of efforts to insert

themselves into the neoliberal economy in

their push to be free from these forces. The

lived resulting tensions point to an “in-

complete” series of U.S.–Mexico relations,

where youth are remaking their sense

of personhood amidst always, unfixed

economic and political orders that change

more rapidly than their abilities to adapt.

Chapter 1 uses the narratives of Roman

and Margarita’s experience of structural

adjustment and poverty to outline how

hiding in cross-border tunnels filled with

human and industrial excrement stretches

their sense of freedom by offering a

space of movement and subterranean

connection, even though the tunnels are

also a place to wait for and embrace,

“imminent death” (p. 51). Rosas suggests

the new frontier draws from the border

region’s late 19th century’s emphasis on

race and criminality, the modern era

of immigration law reform to police

racialized bodies on the border region,


and finally, the “new frontier” of the

present to understand how neoliberalism

impacts the inhabitants of Nogales.

Chapters 2 and 3 hone the edges of

borderlands anxieties in relationship to

outlaws, racialization processes, banditry,

Immigration and Naturalization Service

operations and the North American Free

Trade Agreement, and the severe restric-

tions leveraged against Barrio Libre’s res-

idents to survive under new social and

political conditions and to engage the in-

formal economy. Delinquency emerges as

an ultimate basic trope and side effect

of an everyday marked by failing state

sovereignty symbolized by and diffused

in the porous, messy, and stench-ridden

channels of the sewage tunnels. These sites

are where youth find their homes, free-

doms, pleasures, and deaths in their ul-

timate refusal to occupy a long-term so-

cial and economically precarious position

cultivated through their knowledge that

pathological life is often best punctuated

by pathological death.

Throughout the ethnography, Rosas

uses “nightmare” as an analytical category

to show how tense and imbricated realities,

such as policing, vulnerability, state inse-

curity, and changing forms of sovereignty,

are built into the political and social land-

scape of Barrio Libre. Two interludes are

interspersed between the chapters of this

ethnography: the first interlude hones how

youths’ racialized bodies interpret and

challenge the enduring significance of race

in the world order as the events of 9/11 un-

fold. The second interlude employs Clif-

ford Geertz’s well-known cockfight to re-

new and affirm discrepancies between ne-

oliberal policing and the youth of Barrio

Libre, who perform masculinity as a means

to power and violence.

The text’s most compelling and dis-

turbing passages reside in Chapters 4 and

5 as inhabitants of Barrio Libre are “vio-

lently inaugurated” into the novel neolib-

eral terrain that creates an overwhelmingly

vulnerable, exposed, and devalued popu-

lation. Rosas extends Giorgio Agamben’s

genealogy of exception and homo sacer to

theorize how the “undocumented sacer”

dies quietly and discretely into a new poli-

tics of subordinated life and death, a death

that exceeds Agamben’s “totalizing spaces

of death camps.” Youths’ attempts to em-

brace life and to carve out their own free-

dom is mediated through Rosas’ terms

“imminent ends of life” and tension be-

tween an inevitable pathological life and

delinquent freedoms. The Free ‘Hood’s au-

tobiography of barrio life is not one where

many survive. Yet, it is an account in which

the vexing geographical, historical, and ev-

eryday converge and exceed conventional

neoliberal dynamics.

Scholars from a range of disciplines

will find several valuable insights in this

text. Latin Americanists will appreciate the

rich and meaningful references to the bor-

derlands wrought in relation to the work of

Americo Paredes and Jose Limon. Schol-

ars working on new forms of humanism

will be drawn to Rosas’ ability to draw

out the textures of fragile human forms of

life by means of an ethnographic attention

to imminent death, framed complimen-

tary to other ideas of slow death and cruel

optimism. The ethnography is a valuable

provocation about how El Barrio’s youth

experience the searing effects of a neolib-

eral order, appearing equally submerged as

the subjects and inflictors of violence and

terror, stretching the line of death away

from themselves just as they perceptively

invite and acknowledge their own deaths.

Book Reviews 401

The life that marches and demands

ethnographic attention in this book reveals

new modes of existing and surviving across

borders. But this life against the normative

edge demands a broader recognition of the

operating modes that are complicit in the

creation of these quarantined, distracted,

and impervious youth and the systemic

devaluation of their lives. Rosas focuses

on youths’ repeated acts of defiance—

against Mexico, the United States, and the

elite contoured by class distinctions—and

points to the new means and sensibilities to

challenge authority. This ethnography ap-

proaches the deeply haunting and ghastly

dark realities of competing contemporary

state powers and the lives trapped in their

grizzly forces.

The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodg-ing Narcos on the Migrant Trail. Oscar

Martınez, Daniela Maria Ugaz (Transla-

tor), John Washington (Translator), Fran-

cisco Goldman (Introduction), New York:

Verso, 2014. 224 pp.

Everard MeadeThe University of San Diego

The pictures changed everything. Leaked

photographs of children wrapped in space

blankets and huddled elbow-to-elbow un-

der fluorescent lights conjured Hurricane

Katrina. President Obama declared a hu-

manitarian crisis, journalists descended

on the border, and a group of desperate

children became the latest flashpoint in

a struggle to determine whose suffering

and survival counts in the contemporary

United States.

More than 68,000 unaccompanied

children were apprehended on the south-

ern border of the United States in 2014, up

from 38,000 in 2013 and 24,000 the year

before. The vast majority of these chil-

dren are from Mexico, Guatemala, Hon-

duras, and El Salvador. According to the

UN High Commission for Refugees, 58

percent are fleeing violence and are thus

likely eligible for international protection.

Clutching onto the freight train called

“The Beast,” tied up and beaten in stash

houses while their families are extorted, or

dealing with conniving criminals, deathly

deserts, and rushing rivers—their journey

has become a parable of alienation and

abandonment.

Journalist Oscar Martınez has com-

piled the most fearless, intimate, and

exhaustive chronicle of this journey, to

date. His 2010 book Los migrantes que

no importan anticipated almost every as-

pect of the present crisis. He showed the

displacement, commodification, and ex-

ploitation of Central American children

in Mexico; the funneling of vulnerable

migrants to remote and dangerous cross-

ing points; the takeover of the human

smuggling business by drug trafficking

organizations; and the staggering toll of

kidnapping and rape, death, and disap-

pearance surrounding each step in the

migration process. And he showed that

things were getting worse—more Central

Americans were coming, they were get-

ting younger, and they were getting more

desperate.

Originally published by Icaria in

Barcelona and then by Sur+ in Oaxaca,

an updated version of this prescient book

is now available in a lively English trans-

lation by Daniela Marıa Ugaz and John

Washington. The Beast: Riding the Rails

and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail

traces migrants’ journey from the remotest

redoubts along Mexico’s southern border

with Guatemala to the most contested


crossing points on the northern border

with the United States.

Compact and powerful, each of 14

chapters balances what Francisco Gold-

man’s introduction calls “pilgrims’ tales

about a journey through hell” with facts

and figures from governments, regional

NGOs, and researchers. While most of

these studies are from 2009 and earlier,

it’s striking how relevant they remain, and

the degree to which policymakers claim

to have been blindsided by the apparent

“surge” on the border. Rather than an un-

foreseen crisis, Martınez explains the illicit

movement of people as an integral part of

culture and society in Mexico—one of the

only countries in the world that simulta-

neously sends, receives, and transports mi-

grants through its territory, all on a large

scale.

Martınez renders the migrants’ jour-

ney a confrontation between an underde-

termined social phenomenon and a series

of overdetermined spaces. The book shies

away from explicit scholarly analysis, but it

weaves together three larger phenomena:

rent-seeking in the neo-liberal era, the se-

curitization of borders, and the determi-

nants of migration.

Martınez provides a dizzying array of

examples of predation and rent-seeking

targeted at migrants. Bandits prey upon

migrants on the trains and trails, smug-

glers and narcos charge migrants differ-

ential fees based on their perceived des-

peration and collaborate with kidnappers

to squeeze them further, experienced mi-

grants sell neophytes bad information, and

public officials leverage and extort mi-

grants at every step.

But the most striking example and the

one that articulates into a broader universe

of neoliberal capitalism has to be sex and

the commodification of female migrants.

Martınez uses the myth of the bra tree to

describe the utter banality of rape along

the border:

This is where the bra tree myth

was born. It’s a desert tree literally

draped with the bras and panties

of migrant women who are raped

by bandits along this border. Their

underwear is kept as trophies. I

refer to it as a myth not because it

doesn’t exist, but because it’s not

one tree but many. The rape of

migrant women is a border-wide

practice, from Tecate, passing La

Rumorosa and El Centinela, to the

neighboring state of Sonora. On

this stretch of walled-off frontier,

bra trees grow everywhere.

After citing studies that claim eight in

ten migrant girls are raped while passing

through Mexico, Martınez paraphrases an

official from the International Organiza-

tion for Migration (IOM): “There is . . .

an expression for the transformation of

the migrant’s body: cuerpomatic. The body

becomes a credit card, a new platinum-

edition ‘bodymatic’ which buys you a little

safety, a little bit of cash and the assurance

that your travel buddies won’t get killed.”

This commerce is not just about

the journey. Martınez includes an entire

chapter on the sex trade within southern

Mexico. His interaction with sex workers

is a model of empathy and ethnographic

rapport, with echoes of Lydia’s Open Door

by Patty Kelly. The rent-seeking here is

not simply a question of the legality or

illegality of sex commerce, or the presence

or absence of an interventionist state.

It’s about the criminalization of whole

groups of people in a larger environment

of extreme commodification, where

Book Reviews 403

everything has its price. And that price is

not only measured in money or physical

harm. Martınez shows that many of the

women coerced or recruited into the trade

do not return even if they are financially

or physically able, out of shame.

This is a tragic trope, to be sure, but

Martınez juxtaposes it with a series of

other decisions that are equally subjective,

but no less systematic than a market-based

analysis. He shows how shutting down the

main crossing points in southern Mexico

has channeled migrants to more remote

and dangerous routes—La Arrocera up the

west coast to Ixtepec and through the river-

ine jungles of Tabasco in the east—just

as on the U.S. border shutting down ma-

jor crossing points at El Paso and Tuc-

son has funneled migrants to the deadly

desert near El Altar to the west and the

Rio Grande to the east. There is nothing

theoretical or speculative here—it is part

of the common sense of the border among

migrants and law enforcement alike.

But the funneling phenomenon is not

just about immigration policy or the way

in which it has been subsumed by the

“war on terror.” The escalating drug war

in Mexico is a central villain in the story.

Martınez shows that drug trafficking or-

ganizations exercise de facto sovereignty in

critical border areas and all along the main

transit route. In describing the build-up

of the border near Tucson, for example,

Martınez writes: “It’s a cartel war zone,

which in turn has increased U.S. border

vigilance. One thing leads to another—

violence and then vigilance—and the mi-

grants bear the brunt of both.” He con-

nects the killing of one Border Patrol agent

to the closing of an entire migration cor-

ridor, and thus to the death of scores of

migrants. Martınez confronts members of

the Mexican military and law enforcement,

the Grupo Beta (officers who provide hu-

manitarian relief and directions to mi-

grants), and even the managers of the rail-

road companies. They all claim varying

degrees of sympathy for migrants, but also

helplessness in the face of the mandates

of organized crime and the bureaucratic

constraints of their positions. Of course,

to varying degrees, they all take advan-

tage of the situation as well—selling in-

formation and access, and collecting fees

for their presence or absence in various

places. The money and murder looming

behind these decisions are very real, but

the moral malaise runs much deeper. It’s

embedded in practice and worldview, and

often several degrees separated from ratio-

nal calculation.

Martınez drives home the idea that

we cannot just think of the larger phe-

nomenon as a series of black markets when

he delves into why migrants continue to

make this harrowing journey. In explain-

ing the present crisis, journalists and pol-

icymakers have emphasized either “pull”

factors—the perceived laxity of U.S. immi-

gration policy or, “push” factors—chiefly,

the extreme violence and poverty prolifer-

ating in Central America at the moment.

Both sides acknowledge the perilous jour-

ney through Mexico that these children are

forced to make, but neither fully integrates

that journey into a broader understanding

of the nature and origins of the phe-

nomenon. In so doing, they overlook

not only the social networks and cultural

understandings that inform migrants’ de-

cisions, but also broader more subjective

understandings of poverty and violence.

The migrants Martınez befriends

double down enormous debts. They suffer

incomprehensible terror and loss. They

contemplate a future so uncertain as to be

almost mystical. And then they repeat this


journey until they succeed or die trying.

More than any risk indices, black markets,

or wage gaps, this is a story befitting those

terrible photographs from the Border

Patrol stations.

The Paraguay Reader: History, Culture,Politics. Peter Lambert and Andrew Nick-

son (eds.), Durham, NC: Duke University

Press, 2013. 475 pp.

Caroline E. SchusterAustralian National University

The recently published Paraguay Reader

quotes a common refrain about Paraguay

attributed to literary luminary Agusto Roa

Bastos; Paraguay is a nation best described

as an “island surrounded by land” (1). This

common presumption—reiterated by the

Reader’s editors—of enigmatic and iso-

lated Paraguay helps frame the nation as

a place of mystery, or a canvas upon which

a host of images, desires, fantasies, and

anxieties might be projected. And indeed,

as the editors note, popular and scholarly

treatments alike never seem to resist men-

tioning the more colorful utopic projects:

Mennonites, an Irish beauty, Australian

idealists, Japanese colonias with pagodas

for bus stops.

One of the important contributions

of this edition in Duke University Press’

Latin America Reader series involves his-

toricizing the sociopolitical and cultural

processes that, in less capable hands, ap-

pear as timeless and unchanging features

of Paraguay. Peter Lambert and Andrew

Nickson have a deep knowledge of the

region, and have compiled a remarkable

collection of primary source materials

that locate “The Birth of Paraguay” and

its “Nationalist Experiment” (sections I

and II) in the social and political struggles

of their time, continuing through the

“Transition in Search of Democracy”

(section VI). The editors combine short

essays from specialists like Thomas

Whigham and Harris Gaylord Warren,

with the writings of Paraguayan political

figures. These range from 19th century

notables Juan O’Leary and Eliza Lynch to

the work of contemporary figures such

as the inaugural Presidential Speech of

Fernando Lugo. The editors’ thoughtful

summaries put these short documents in

conversation with the broader contexts

from which they emerged. For readers

seeking an introduction to Paraguayan

history and instructors interested in

incorporating a tremendous range of

source materials in the classroom, the

Paraguay Reader is an excellent resource.

The Paraguay Reader does much to

challenge subtly the “island” isolation of

Paraguay by highlighting the history of

forging and breaking ties within the region

and across the world. By including the

literary writings of authors ranging from

R. B. Cunninghame Graham to Graham

Greene, the editors gesture to the ways

Paraguay’s putative isolation has long been

enlisted by British thinkers as an imagina-

tive space located beyond the “modern.”

At the same time, important politico-

economic connections—which are thor-

oughly modern—appear throughout the

volume. A report attributed to Paraguay’s

famously nationalist and isolationist first

president, Doctor Francia, appeared in the

London Press in 1824. A particularly mov-

ing diary entry from an English immigrant

named Annie Elizabeth Kennett in 1873

detailed her hardships in the Paraguayan

hinterlands, but also tells a larger story

about Paraguayan sovereign borrowing

on British capital markets and the

advertisement of the bonds through

development programs undertaken by

Book Reviews 405

“Lincolnshire Farmers” like Kennett.

Section VI on Paraguay’s “Transition in

Search of Democracy” highlights broader

contexts for these state-making projects,

from the writings of hydroelectric en-

gineer and technocrat Ricardo Canese

considering the promises and perils of

the Itaipu binational dam, to a foreign

journalist’s account of international

commerce in Paraguay’s Triple Frontier

with Argentina and Brazil.

In the introduction, Lambert and

Nickson frame these dense transnational

processes as a feature of Paraguay as “a

land of contrasts” (1). They juxtapose

Paraguay’s isolation, where “until a few

decades ago isolated communities seemed

to lie adrift in the ‘oceans’ of surrounding

cattle land and forest, cut off from moder-

nity,” (1) against jarring expressions of

hypermodernity exemplified by the Itaipu

hydroelectric plant and gleaming shop-

ping malls and mansions of the capital

city of Asuncion (2–3). Indeed, while

the editors describe “a number of unique

experiments throughout [Paraguay’s]

history” (5), they are largely silent on

Paraguay’s long history as a crucible

of economic experimentation through

liberalized markets and export-oriented

development. In fact, Paraguay may in

many respects offer a preview of the social

ramifications—especially deepening

inequality—of Latin America’s neoliberal

turn in the past decade.

Indeed, the “image of a quaint country

stuck in a time warp” (3), about which the

editors are decidedly ambivalent, can blind

readers to the ways in which Paraguay has

long participated in and been shaped by

transnational connections; this is a story

that emerges insistently across the Reader’s

pages. While the introduction worries over

the “self-perpetuating circle of myth and

stereotype” (4), one strength of subse-

quent selections lies in the ways they con-

tinuously undermining the tendency for

Paraguay to “[fall] off the edges of our

mental maps of the world—Latin Amer-

ica’s answer to Timbuktu” (4). This might

have been emphasized more directly by

the editors. What is more, in addition

to “[striking] a small blow for people’s

history over fantasy, cliche, and stereo-

type,” (10) the Reader participates in a

growing conversation among anthropol-

ogists seeking to theorize the simultane-

ous centrality and marginality of Paraguay

within regimes of global interconnection.

Anthropologists interested in the cultural

historical contexts of these interconnec-

tions within and across the hemisphere

will find much to like in the Reader. They

may well look to current scholarship in an-

thropology, however, for explorations of

Paraguayan culture going beyond recipes

for traditional foods that appear in the

Reader (449) in order to understand their

surprising global reach.

Multibook Review

“Street Gangs, Violence, and CommunitySpace in Honduras, El Salvador, and LosAngeles”

Gangsters Without Borders: An Ethnog-raphy of a Salvadoran Street Gang.T. W. Ward, New York: Oxford Univer-

sity Press, 2013. 230 pp.

Space of Detention: The Making of aTransnational Gang Crisis Between LosAngeles and San Salvador Elana Zilberg,


Jesus and the Gang: Youth Violenceand Christianity in Urban Honduras.


Jon Wolseth, Tucson: The University of

Arizona Press, 2011. 156 pp.

Daniel SchneiderCUNY Graduate Center

In 2014, yet another crisis at the U.S.–

Mexico border took hold of the media

in the United States. This time the media

spotlight focused in on the relatively

high number of unaccompanied minors

being detained by U.S. Customs and

Border Patrol. Expressing alarm that the

number of child migrants detained at

the border without parents tripled each

year from 2011 to 2013, the crisis of

the unaccompanied minors produced a

discourse concerning not only the state of

U.S. immigration policy and the failure of

Congress to pass reform legislation, but

also on the broader relationship between

the United States and the countries

often referred to today as the Northern

Triangle of Central America (Guatemala,

Honduras, and El Salvador).

What seemed most surprising about

the crisis of the unaccompanied minors

was the success with which many left

and center-left commentators were able

to steer clear of much older framings of

Central American migrants in terms of

gangs, criminality, and terrorism. They

pointed out that child migrants fled

poverty and suffered from the widespread

violence of street gangs and drug cartels.

They described the perilous journey

through Mexico and across the desert

borderlands. President Obama even

framed the situation as a “humanitarian

crisis.” In this discourse, the violence and

danger of Central America was distinctly

there, even though its victims had arrived

at the U.S.–Mexico border.

The ethnographies discussed below

all respond to a framing of Central

America–U.S. relations that similarly tries

to locate the violence of street gangs in

the discursive space of Central America,

far away from the United States. In other

words, what Zilberg refers to as the

“transnational youth gang crisis” (3) is

an obsession with transnational criminal

organizations. The obsession is most

fixated on transnational street gangs, such

as La Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and La

Mara Dieciocho (MS-18), but also includes

cartels that are internationally famous for

transgressing territorial boundaries and

sociolegal norms. In part as a result, the

transnational youth gang crisis produces

a “distorted, stereotypical view of street

gangs as highly organized, criminal

organizations bent on murder and

mayhem,” and this representation “has

been perpetrated by gang members and

law enforcement officials tasked with the

attempt to curb their criminal activities”

(Ward:3).

In Honduras and El Salvador, street

gangs are a symbol of the nation’s failure

to look after its youth and to rebuild

the nation in the wake of civil war and

neoliberal globalization (Zilberg:180;

Wolseth:10). However, in the United

States, transnational gangs are seen not

as a failure of national development, but

as a threatening element of the migration

of Central American populations to a

nation-state still overwhelmingly concep-

tualized as white. In both cases the gangs

are represented as transgressing the moral

and legal order of the nation, inspiring a

similar set of antigang policies.

In the 1990s, New York Police Com-

missioner William Bratton developed a

signature approach to policing based on

Kelling and Wilson’s Broken Windows

Theory (see Zilberg:272). This theory

argues that addressing a city’s violent

Book Reviews 407

crime most effectively involves cracking

down on nonviolent, quality of life crimes,

such as panhandling, public drinking, and

loitering. By making this still empirically

contested connection between violent

crime and low-level offences, Broken

Windows Policing reinscribes low-level

criminal violations as challenges to the

moral order of a city, or a type of threat

whose consequence is of the same order

as murder or terrorism.

These ethnographies understand zero

tolerance policing as an attempt to assert

control over urban spaces being trans-

formed by the processes of neoliberal glob-

alization. Prolonged civil wars in Central

America had already brought waves of mi-

grants to Los Angeles, turning what was

once predominantly African American

South Central Los Angeles into the cen-

ter of Central American community life.

Urban revitalization movements through

public–private partnerships set these same

areas, which had been long neglected by

city governments and by private capi-

tal, as their target for urban development

(Zilberg:34). In El Salvador, the postcivil

war government preempted the signing of

a free trade pact with the United States

by modeling its trade policies on the

framework laid out by the North Amer-

ican Free Trade Agreement with Mexico

(Zilberg:33). This rapid transition from

import industrialization to free trade in

the context of civil war recovery produced

additional economic shocks and forced

many Salvadorans to rely on remittances

from relatives in the United States to stay

afloat. In Honduras, structural adjustment

meant that the government spent more

resources servicing its debt than it could

spend on economic and social develop-

ment (Wolseth:10).

Important too is the fact that the in-

creased policing of urban space occurred

alongside policies that connected policing

to deportation. Many of the informants

whose voices appear in the studies dis-

cussed here have been deported or have

had family members deported from the

United States. In 1996, the U.S. Congress

passed a set of laws that expanded dras-

tically the number of crimes that made

noncitizens deportable, set up procedures,

such as expedited removal and “alien ter-

rorist removal procedures,” that allowed

noncitizens to be “accused, tried, and

deported, without ever appearing in

court,” and made gang membership a con-

dition for exclusion from any form of

immigration relief in the United States

(Zilberg:36). These policies worked in

conjunction with anti-immigrant legis-

lation, excluding undocumented immi-

grants from accessing public services as

well as zero-tolerance policing strategies to

increase the deportation of gang members

and suspected members from Los Angeles

to El Salvador (Zilberg:37) and to Hon-

duras. The MS-13 and MS-18 are often

portrayed as a product of Central America

and the cycle of violence unleashed by civil

war and its destruction, but the authors

stress that, contrary to the law enforce-

ment view, Mara Salvatrucha did not orig-

inate in El Salvador. It was not a guerilla

offshoot, nor was it the product of gang

transplants from El Salvador. Salvadoran

youth learned the street gang subculture

in the United States and then exported it

back to their homeland after they were de-

ported (Ward:75).

With the help of William Bratton

and the police departments he trained,

zero-tolerance policing emerged in El Sal-

vador as El Plan Mano Dura. Mano Dura


established joint patrols between the Sal-

vadoran police and military, putting sol-

diers on the streets of San Salvador for the

first time since the civil war (Zilberg:46).

Mano Dura’s next iteration, El Plan Super

Mano Dura, stiffly increased punishments

for gang activity and lowered, to 12 years,

the age at which people could be tried

as adults (Zilberg:46). The consequences

of this criminalization of youth are

not just jail time, but death: Wolseth’s

study includes troubling vignettes that

describe the scene of a gang member’s

assassination at the hands of police and

of the systemic murder of young people

through nongang, vigilante violence.

How, then, might anthropologists

challenge the dominant framing of

transnational youth gangs as criminal

and terrorist, a discourse that legiti-

mates policies whose consequences are

imprisonment, deportation, and often

death? The studies discussed here do so by

resituating gang violence within historical

processes constituted by multiple forms of

violence, beginning with the Salvadoran

civil war and U.S. military support in

Central America and extending into the

present. These forms blur the boundary

between state, structure, and criminality.

Second, the authors deploy theoretical

frames that focus attention not on violence

itself, but on the way that violence is me-

diated by struggles to define identity, both

individual and collective, and the mean-

ing of public space. Finally, the authors

present ethnographic materials in ways

that trouble commonsense distinctions

made between state and nonstate actors.

The civil war in El Salvador began in

1981, led to nearly 100 thousand Salvado-

ran deaths, and started a mass migration

of one-sixth of the country’s population

(Zilberg:26). Accounts of this war have

emphasized the extreme brutality of sol-

diers fighting on both sides; executions,

torture, rape, extortion, and death threats

were a tactic deployed by both the state and

by guerilla forces. For Ward, the violence

of El Salvador’s civil war lies at the cen-

ter of gang activity. His ethnography of La

Mara Salvatrucha and its members living

in Los Angeles counters the claim that all

gang members are hyperviolent, danger-

ous, and criminal. Ward differentiates be-

tween different levels of gang membership,

and he makes clear that he is mostly con-

cerned with the so-called “hardcore gang

members.” These members commit to the

gang wholeheartedly, with their bodies,

emotions, identities, and sometimes, their

lives. Ward argues that these members are

those most likely to commit acts of vi-

olence because they “practice much less

self-control than other members of the

gang, and are extremely opportunistic, free

to express their anger and their greed”

(Ward:xviii).

In addition differentiating between

levels of affiliation, two other chapters

in Ward’s work stand out in relation

to the antigang discourse; these are his

chapter on leaving the gang (“becoming

calmado”), and the one on women’s partic-

ipation in street gangs. Ward writes against

the common understanding that the only

way to leave a gang is through death: “For

MS members there are often pressures to

stay active in the gang, but according to the

gang’s unwritten rules, once one has paid

one’s dues . . . he or she has permission

to become calmado” (Ward:177). Further,

gang members commonly undergo a

process of disillusionment that drives

them away, even as this may lead them

to grapple with the loss of fictive kin and

familial ties. Regretfully, Ward’s chapter

on women’s participation in gangs does

Book Reviews 409

little beyond discuss women’s participa-

tion. It relies on overly generalized terms

that frame women, first and foremost,

as victims of gang life who live on the

margin of gang masculinity. Ward thus

fails to discuss the broad range of women’s

relationship to gangs, nor does he offer

the possibility that women are more than

stereotypical victims of male violence.

Overgeneralizations and stereotypes

reappear in Ward’s work, seemingly due to

his theoretical frame: the gang members

whose stories appear on the pages of

Ward’s text are not representations of

individual people, but rather composites

drawn from Ward’s ethnographic data.

Ward argues that this was done to protect

informants’ identities. Yet, it also fits well

with his theoretical frame, one concerned

with uncovering an overarching model

of gang psychology. This theoretical

approach is a psychological one, which

leads Ward to conceptualize the effects of

El Salvador’s civil war as a “psychological

trauma” that continues to influence the

behaviors of hardcore gang members

(35). The trauma produced by the site of

dead bodies (35) and the persistent fear of

violence was then compounded by gang

members’ poor relationships with their

parents. In addition, Ward describes the

abuse and prejudice faced by Salvadorans

in both Mexico and the United States,

something he argues compounds the

traumas of war, separation, and discrim-

ination to make the most hardcore gang

members “suspicious, aggressive, . . . and

exceedingly short fused” (67).

Ward’s account reverts quickly to

psychological tropes, biological analogies,

and unsupported assumptions that lead

the reader to believe that these traumas

have helped to transform gang youth into

deviants with persistent psychological

disorders. For example, Ward attempts

to explain why youth join the gang by

referencing the emotional bonds formed

between immigrant youth and gang mem-

bers (51), adolescent frustrations (59), and

young people’s “immature brain” (59).

These assumptions lead Ward to argue

that the belief among gang members

that jumping-in is also a process of

identity transformation is a result of their

“delusional minds” (57). Ward also refers

repeatedly to gang members as “deviants”

who suffer from a “deficit of beliefs and a

deficit of opportunities” (65) and are part

of a “deviant subculture.” The fact that

these descriptions are deeply problematic

should be quite obvious. So while they

may make it possible to argue that the

ultimate fault of violence perpetrated by

gang members is not their own, they also

suggest that the predilection for violence

has become part of gang members’ very

condition of being. Ward’s account,

then, is astonishingly dehumanizing, sets

up the conclusion that La Mara Salva-

trucha needs to be dealt with through

concerted law enforcement and the ins-

titutionalization of gang members.

Zilberg also highlights El Salvador’s

civil war as a formative event in the lives

of her informants, but the civil war is

understood as an event that sparked the

processes of migration, interconnection,

poverty, and violence that placed El

Salvador and Salvadoran immigrants

at the heart of U.S. security concerns.

The policies enacted to address these

concerns helped create the neoliberal

“‘securityscape,’ through and in which

both the United States and El Salvador are

linked and complicit” (3). The idea of the

securityscape points to the transnational

connections created by nation-states at-

tempting to secure both capital flows and


populations. Throughout the civil war, El

Salvador was a receiving country for mil-

lions of dollars in U.S. military largesse.

Following the war, the United States con-

tinued to provide funding, training, and

administrative support for El Salvador’s

military and police agencies. Over the

course of the 1990s and 2000s, the focus

of this support changed from influencing

the outcome of the war to combatting

the “transnational gang crisis.” The El

Salvador–U.S. securityscape, Zilberg ar-

gues, produces a relation of “simultaneity”

between Los Angeles and San Salvador

from which “the United States and El Sal-

vador emerge as a dense hall of mirrors, an

endlessly refracted and warped time and

space of connection and contact” (18).

Zilberg’s ethnography is, then, neces-

sarily multisited. She studies Pico Union,

an important destination for Central

American migrants in South Central

Los Angeles, and various working class

neighborhoods in San Salvador. These

neighborhoods in San Salvador were

once the homes of migrants who became

members of MS-13 and MS-18 in Los

Angeles, and they later became receiving

destinations for gang members deported

from Los Angeles to El Salvador. While

recognizing the important connections

between the two locations, Zilberg’s

detailed ethnographic work also attends

closely to the many differences between

the two. She focuses on the social pro-

duction of space in each location, arguing

that the clash between competing rep-

resentations of urban space produced at

the level of everyday life, political conflict,

and urban planning is one of the most

useful sites for observing neoliberalism’s

disorienting effects. In Los Angeles, the

struggle over Pico Union is waged between

city planners and real estate developers

eyeing the city center for development,

immigrant activists making claims on

the city for resources and services denied

as a result of privatization, the LAPD’s

Rampart Division antigang unit, the gangs

themselves, and many neighborhood res-

idents who inhabit neighborhood space.

Zilberg then follows deportees back to San

Salvador, and describes how deportees

are thrust into a city whose geography

has been reconfigured by MS-13 and

MS-18. Zilberg details how deported gang

members and peace activists look to the

territorial divisions of Los Angeles as a

way to understand and make sense of San

Salvador. A deportee in San Salvador is

“forever marked by ‘where he is from,’

which is to say his territorial affiliation

in Los Angeles” (144). This often means

that the familial homes and destinations

of deportees in San Salvador may lie in

rival gang territories, which increases the

vulnerability of deportees to violence.

Most important for her intervention

is that Zilberg demonstrates that in this

process of reconfiguration and struggle

over urban space, the distinctions made

by states to differentiate between friend

and enemy, gang and police, criminal

and innocent, as well as citizen and

other are disrupted and blurred. Zilberg’s

narrative adds to discussions of the ways

Broken Windows policing eviscerates the

distinctions between low-level violation,

serious crimes, and even terrorism. Her

chapters are partly organized around

representational figures that appear in the

struggle over space and embody contra-

dictory elements. These figures include

the “gang-peace-activist,” the “Soldier

Cop,” and the “Criminal Cop,” In the

chapter on the “Criminal Cop,” Zilberg

discusses LAPD’s Rampart Division

CRASH scandal in detail. The scandal

Book Reviews 411

broke after it was discovered that LAPD

officers were involved in beatings, evi-

dence planting, narcotics dealing, perjury,

and bank robbery. These officers embody

the contradictions on which Zilberg fo-

cuses because they no longer take form as

enforcers of the law, but come to resemble

representations of gang members. Zilberg

bolsters this argument by demonstrating

that, in the height of the emerging crisis

in the 1990s, both the street gangs and

the LAPD Rampart CRASH division

operated according to nearly the same

spatial logics for control over urban

neighborhoods: They both deployed

hypermasculinized male bodies as

symbols of their power, patrolled neigh-

borhoods against enemy gangs, and

participated in the drug economy. Here

gangs and police take on a “mimetic”

relationship to each other, a point that

destabilizes any simplistic attempt to

argue that transnational gangs represent

a threat to a neoliberal order dominated

by U.S. imperial power.

In Jesus and the Gang, John Wolseth

engages the antigang discourse through a

somewhat related discussion of neighbor-

hood and community space. Wolseth ad-

dresses the social production of space in a

way similar to Zilberg, as a useful site for

analysis that turns ethnographic attention

away from gangs and gang violence toward

the ways that Central American youth, in-

cluding gang members, are immersed in

larger contexts constituted through vio-

lence. He then shows us how young people

use discourses about and practices within

community space to mediate the presence

of violence in their lives.

In his exploration of youths’ struggles

to mediate the violence in their lives,

Wolseth integrates an attention to the

material spaces of the Colonia Belen

neighborhood, the practices of social

groups in that neighborhood, and the use

of youthful bodies as sites for communica-

tion and discursive contestation. Wolseth

argues that in Colonia Belen “discussions

about the moral quality of youth” are

mediated by struggles over the meaning of

public space (29). Residents attempt to lo-

cate danger in specific places that are also

linked to different kinds of activities and

people. Space becomes both a language for

talking about violence in the community,

and a site of contestation between the

police, gangs, nongang youth, Evangelical

organizations and Catholic organizations.

In Wolseth’s account, the violence does

not have a single or direct cause but is

an everyday condition of life in Colonia

Belen.

Wolseth’s ethnographic analysis of

Christian youth groups sets it apart from

the other texts discussed in this review. As

the primary institutions—besides gangs

and police—that engage Honduran youth,

catholic and evangelical churches pro-

vide resources for youth to be part of

their communities and to avoid violence.

They do so, however, in distinct ways. As

a result of liberation theology and the

Church’s discourse of “accompaniment”

with the poor in their struggles for jus-

tice, Catholic youth groups employ an in-

clusive concept of community. This sug-

gests that youth may become part of a

moral community through ethical action

in public, and through solidarity with the

poor (94). In an effort to enact that soli-

darity, Catholic youth groups invite gang

members to join their meetings, but in

an environment where gang activity is

ascribed by public association, Catholic

youth are not easily able to prevent them-

selves from being seen as close to the gang.

In other words, “accompaniment” did not


overcome the social distinction between

gang youth and Honduran youth embed-

ded in the antigang discourse; it merely

enhanced it by placing both groups in the

same social space. In Wolseth’s account,

this contradiction often alienated gang

members from participating in Catholic

organizations because they felt unaccepted

by Catholic youth, even though their

discourse privileged inclusive community.

Evangelical youth groups, on the other

hand, employ a discourse that separates

the community of the saved from the

social space of the neighborhood. This

separation melds with the understanding

that community participation is a con-

tinual performance of one’s religiosity:

abstaining from immoral behaviors, such

as drinking, dancing, and promiscuous

sex “signals to the larger community one’s

righteousness, and, in the process, trans-

forms one’s relationship with others in the

community” (106).

Wolseth’s insights help to explain why

Evangelical conversion has become one

of the primary avenues for leaving gangs:

“Gang members, as well as others in the

community, regard evangelical churches

as a reforming institution, a viable re-

source for changing one’s self-destructive

behavior” (110). In the same way that gang

membership requires young men to per-

form and mark their bodies with tattoos,

clothing, and hand gestures, religious con-

version requires a similar and comparable

performance of one’s dedication to God:

Cristiano young men and women

must demonstrate to gang mem-

bers their devotion to the church.

This includes semiotic markers of

their status, such as the order-

liness of their dress (long pants

and shirts tucked in for young

men, heeled shoes and knee-

length dresses for young women),

their ability to quote scripture

and evangelize to members of the

community, their length of in-

volvement in the church, and their

relationship with other cristianos

in the neighborhood. (111)

Evangelical conversion ensures that an

individual has actually left gang life. When

performed convincingly, it also signals cer-

tainty that individual is no longer a poten-

tial rival or threat to other gangs.

As anthropologists, our work is

embedded within discursive fields and

processes that extend far beyond the

academy. It is especially important to rec-

ognize this when studying controversial

topics, such as street gangs. The authors

discussed above have shown that, since

the early 1990s, street gangs have been a

motivating factor for sets of state policies

that disseminate brutal violence across the

Americas. These policies rely on an overly

simplified construction of street gangs

that frames them as an irredeemable

enemy of national order. In different ways,

Ward, Zilberg, and Wolseth have injected

complexity into specialists’ and everyday

citizens’ understanding of street gangs.

These representations trouble an antigang

discourse that legitimates state violence.

Book Reviews 413

Review: The Paraguay Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Peter Lambert and Andrew Nickson (eds.),...

Documents

Transcript of Review: The Paraguay Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Peter Lambert and Andrew Nickson (eds.),...