Commentary: Marking “Preemptive Suspects”: Migration, Bodies, and Exclusion

• Published date: 01 November 2018
• Date: 01 November 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X17699915
• Subject Matter: ArticlesImmigration

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 223, Vol. 45 No. 6, November 2018, 30–36

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X17699915

© 2017 Latin American Perspectives

30

Seth M. Holmes is an associate professor of medical anthropology and community health sciences

at the University of California, Berkeley, and a faculty fellow at Humboldt University Berlin. His

Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States (2013) received national awards

in anthropology, sociology, and geography. He thanks the two reviewers from Latin American

Perspectives, whose insights helped produce a more cohesive article; Lynn Stephen, Maria Cruz-

Torres, and the Michael Kearney Lecture Committee of the Society for Applied Anthropology for

providing the space to engage with these ideas together; and IGK Work and the Lifecourse in

Global History at Humboldt University Berlin for providing support and time to work on this

paper. He is indebted to the late Michael Kearney, whose anthropological work on immigration,

indigenous Mexican communities in the United States, and migrant health inspired him to embark

on research related to these topics a dozen years ago.

699915LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X17699915LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVESHolmes / COMMENTARY

research-article2017

Marking “Preemptive Suspects”

Migration, Bodies, and Exclusion

by

Seth M. Holmes

The dynamics of inclusion and exclusion are central to public perceptions

and policy responses to transnational immigrants, including those arriving

from Latin America in the United States. Scholars have shown in various con-

texts that even official inclusion by a nation-state involves important grada-

tions of exclusion on social, economic, political, and symbolic levels (e.g.,

Blommaert and Verschueren, 1998; Castañeda, 2012). Social scientists have ana-

lyzed the metaphors through which different variations of exclusion are pro-

moted and enacted, including the dichotomy of the undeserving voluntary

economic migrant versus the (relatively) deserving forced political refugee

(e.g., Holmes, 2013; Holmes and Castañeda, 2016; Yarris and Castañeda, 2015).

Lynn Stephen analyzes the “preemptive suspect” as a metaphor of exclusion in

the treatment of unaccompanied Central American minors arriving in the

United States in 2014. She builds on her previous work on indigenous Mexican

families (2007), resistance (2002; 2005; 2013), and transborder life (2007), syn-

thesizing and organizing substantial scholarship and placing it in historical

context. At the same time, her diverse experiences as ethnographer, activist,

expert witness, and comadre add local color and thick description to her rigor-

ous analysis. She develops her analysis explicitly in honor of Michael Kearney,

who examined theoretical understandings of immigration and conducted eth-

nographic work focused on indigenous Mexican migrants in the United States

and especially on their health (e.g., Kearney, 1986; Kearney and Nagengast,

1989). His focus on health, health care, and bodies seems especially important

here. After all, for many transnational migrants the gradations of exclusion

encountered in the process of displacement can easily become a matter of life

and death.

In this commentary, I build on Stephen’s helpful conceptualization of the

“preemptive su spect” with a focus on bodies, life, and death. I will start my

Commentary