In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

4 / Corporate Containment: Refugee Seafarers on the Seas of Transnational Labor I have become acclimatized to the sea. As we bob along the Costa Rican coast the wind begins to pick up and it starts to rain. I look up and notice three flags flying proud and stiff. The Liberian flag, which is the flag of the country where the ship is registered; the Costa Rican flag, it being a tradition to hoist the flag of whatever country’s waters one is sailing; and finally there is a bright yellow flag marked “Del Monte Quality Bananaen.” —caryl phillips, the atlantic sound the belly of this boat dissolves you, precipitates you into a nonworld from which you cry out —édouard glissant, poetics of relation After spending months trapped aboard a nonfunctioning ship in Brooklyn Harbor, Esteban Gaitán, the protagonist of Francisco Goldman ’s novel The Ordinary Seaman (1997), tells those he meets when he ventures into Brooklyn, that he is a “refugee from a ship.”1 In fact, he has been working aboard a flag of convenience ship,2 owned by Americans , registered to Panama, operated by a Central American crew. The crew has not been paid and lives in abhorrent conditions, without electricity, running water, or often food. They cannot legally leave the ship because they have no identification papers. This situation has been enabled by the ship’s flag of convenience registry, which has less regulation and oversight than the more conventional registries. By referring to himself as a “refugee,” Esteban emphasizes that he is without protections and has no place that he can claim. He has stated his situation in these terms as a response to a question from Gonzalo, a gay hairdresser from Cuba whom he has just met. When Gonzalo learns that Esteban is from Nicaragua, he assumes they are in the “same boat”—both refugees fleeing communism. With some trepidation Esteban tells him that he was a Sandinista soldier. Instead of lecturing him on the evils of leftist movements, Gonzalo merely reminds Esteban that he will have to tell a different story if he is to remain in the United States legally: 178 / corporate containment “it will be much easier for you to get legal status here when you tell them you’re fleeing those maldito Sandinistas. If you say the opposite, chico, you won’t stand a chance.”3 Gonzalo represents the position of a refugee who has successfully navigated and benefited from the politics of the U.S. asylum process because he declared his nonallegiance with a communist country. His comments emphasize the performative aspects of testimony in the asylum process. Esteban will need to adhere to the Cold War asylum ideology of the United States if he too hopes to be allowed legitimate entrance to the state.4 Esteban remains confused over this set of rules, “What, he’s going to have to betray old War Gods to stay in this country . . . ?”5 In fact, like Haitians, pro-Sandinista Nicaraguans and other Central Americans faced enormous difficulties in gaining asylum in the United States in the 1980s.6 The exchange highlights a central conflict for Esteban as he attempts to reconcile his life as a soldier with his present situation as an exploited migrant worker. Although testifying against the Sandinistas could earn him asylum, testifying to the abhorrent living conditions on a ship sitting in Brooklyn Harbor would not. The narrator’s comments emphasize this, “[The crew] knew they should have been paid, in a combination of checks and cash . . . but who was there to protest to?”7 By referring to himself as a refugee from a ship, Esteban links the status of refugee, normally constituted in terms of political persecution, with labor exploitation. In doing so, Esteban becomes an agent in the limbo gateway between citizen and migrant, reassembling the language of displacement and statelessness. One problem is clear: the flag of convenience ship is not a national territory of the kind that refugees normally flee, even though it flies the flag of a nation; thus, his claim to be a refugee from a ship raises some important questions about how national territories are imagined in relation to global capitalism and transnational labor and the rights of those who occupy these spaces. Chapter 3 addressed the exploitative conditions between the Dominican nation-state and Haitian migrant laborers, but this chapter’s discussion of the exploitation of seafarers indicates another kind of precarious labor situation for those who work on ships...

Share