Border Rhetorics: Citizenship and Identity on the US-Mexico Frontier

13. The Ragpicker-Citizen

13 The Ragpicker-Citizen Toby Miller This chapter juggles multiple determinations and overdeterminations, keeping the interrelationships of state, capital, people, environment, and discourse in tension. My method draws on work done to forward a new communication studies that differs from aesthetic criticism based on interpretation and identity, as per much of media and cultural studies; scientistic service to militarism, business, policing, and the professions (q.v. mainstream communication research); and the neoliberal embrace of bourgeois economics undertaken by prelates of the creative industries (Miller, “‘Step Away’”; Miller, “Media Studies 3.0”; Miller, “A future for Media Studies”). The project necessitates a radical contextualization of the shifts and shocks of institutions and rhetorics. Such an approach combines political economy, ethnography, and textual analysis, weaving its way across commentary, fiction , statistics, poetry, law, science, and history to construct a materialist account of political-economic transformations and myths, in this case at the Mexico-US border. it delves into cultural citizenship to address policy and rights as well as structure and spectacle (Miller, Cultural Citizenship; DeChaine , “Bordering the Civic imaginary”; Robertson). Let’s begin with four quotations. They come from both famous and less well-known sources:“[f]oul and adventures-seeking dregs of the bourgeoisie , there were vagabonds, dismissed soldiers, discharged convicts, runaway galley slaves, sharpers, jugglers, lazzaroni, pickpockets, sleight-of-hand performers , gamblers, procurers, keepers of disorderly houses, porters, literati, organ grinders, rag pickers, scissors grinders, tinkers, beggars—in short, that whole undefined, dissolute, kicked-about mass” (Marx 63). The quotation above is Marx’s description of “sub-proletariat” classes living outside conventional government and commerce in nineteenth-century france (oppenheimer ). Such people continue to pose “problems” for critics and fellow residents: The community in question occupied a tract of land at the foot of the mesa. Above it hunkered the remains of Reciclaje Integral, a deserted smelting and battery recycling plant. for years the residents of vista nueva had reported skin ulcers, respiratory ailments, birth defects. A number of children had died. . . . When it became apparent that 214 / Miller charges would be brought against him in a Mexican court, however, the owner, an American, simply filed for bankruptcy in Mexico, left the factory as it stood, and withdrew across the border, where he continued to prosper. . . . He lived in a million-dollar house somewhere in San Diego County while his deserted plant continued to poison the residents of vista nueva. (nunn 25) This second quotation comes from Kem nunn’s surfing mystery novel, Tijuana Straits, a complex story of violence, misunderstanding, difference, sacrifice , and redemption on and across the Mexican-US border, under the sign of maquiladoras and their deadly, rancorous impact on occupational and residential health and safety. The seeming villain of the novel is himself a victim of the systematic exploitation of workers, who move between ragpicking , employment, and drug use in a desperate cycle. The world it describes is like the one Marx sought to explain—a liminal life in terms of both physical borders and metaphorical exclusions. A modern equivalent world has been textualized by some of its occupants /activists: The national Coalition of Electronic industry Workers, declares that five years after the publication of the Electronic industry Code of Conduct: the same companies that signed the Code are the ones violating the human labor rights. The Code states (part A-7) that the signing companies should respect the workers’ freedom of association. This right, in our federal Labor Law, is constantly violated. We recall two recent cases. The first one: the dismissal of more than 10 workers of flextronics, only because they demanded transparency on the issue of profit shares. The second case was the dismissal of Aureliano Rosas Suárez, omar Manuel Montes Estrada y vicente de Jesús Rodr íguez Roa, sacked because they demanded their right to have their wages leveled. They also worked for the company flextronics.We inform the international Electronic industry that the members of the national Coalition of Electronic industry Workers will continue to use this mask as a symbol of our repression. But the coalition will continue demanding and defending our human labor rights. (Centre for Reflection and Action on Labour issues 28) This third quotation comes from a group of masked activists who protest labor conditions. These anonymous protestors have made periodic media appearances since 2007, drawing attention to the employment agencies that The Ragpicker-Citizen / 215 govern the casualized world of electronics workers...