A Common Humanity: Ritual, Religion, and Immigrant Advocacy in Tucson, Arizona

9. Ritual Transformation and Cosmopolitics in Tucson Immigrant Advocacy

174 chapter nine Ritual Transformation and Cosmopolitics in Tucson Immigrant Advocacy If, as William Blake wrote, “you can see the universe in a grain of sand,” then there are plenty of opportunities to see the universe in the Sonoran Desert. In fact, there are plenty of opportunities to do so with just a footprint in the Sonoran Desert, or a cast-off backpack, or an empty water bottle. For that matter, return to Rick Ufford-Chase’s suggestion, noted in chapter 1, that the best place to ponder the question “Who is my neighbor ?” in a globalizing world might be a poor neighborhood in a Mexican border town. There, among the cinder block shantytowns, factory assembly lines, newly urbanized refugees, and fortifications at the international port of entry, one could extrapolate an entire planet of comparable divisions and deprivations, because, as two immigrant advocates argue, “the border is . . . just a symbol” (Grisele) of “a huge misdistribution of wealth and land and power” (Patricia). In other words, if you want to understand what is at stake in globalization, you don’t have to visit the whole world. The grain of sand that is the border will do—but only if you look. Though few immigrant advocates used the word “globalization” in their interviews, they routinely described migration as a consequence and demonstration of social connections greater than national parameters. Whether they gave these connections a name or not, they almost unanimously faulted them for failing to alleviate the endemic poverty of the global South, which has produced throngs of people willing to hazard treacherous journeys to more prosperous regions. If, as it seems, commerce has globalized, ethical imaginations have not kept pace. Ritual Transformation and Cosmopolitics • 175 Immigrant advocacy in the Arizona-Sonora borderlands extends from a desire to close that ethical gap by changing the behavior of the United States in an international community where it holds disproportionate power and wealth. As much as immigrant advocates consider projects with and on behalf of migrants worthy in and of themselves, their campaigns are also self-reflexive commentaries on the need for changes in individual and collective consciousness. The strongest conceptual thread running throughout their work in all its variety is the need for an ethical orientation greater than modern political geographies. To effect and strengthen this orientation, they seek to redeem the interstitial spaces where conventional boundaries of nationality blur, pushing people (including themselves) to recognize interstices as potential encounters with estranged aspects of the self, the community, and the divine. “Dirt” and the Nation-State System Although satellite communications and capital mobility drape the early twenty-first century with a cloak of novelty, the issues these and other globalization touchstones raise for political identity are ancient. Nothing is very original about the need to define society, understand one’s obligations to others, find values higher than one’s individual life, and achieve material fulfillment. Human sociability seems to require that collective identities be formed (and re-formed) in tandem with visions (and re-visions) of ultimacy, so that adhering to normative relationships is conceptualized as loyalty to transcendent purposes. In modernity, nationalism has become the dominant framework in which people resolve these vexations. This is true of particular nationalisms , which are exclusive to finite people and places, but also of a more general nation-statist ideology that characterizes nationalism as a natural, divinely ordained organization of the entire human species. Codified nowhere , even as they are present everywhere, its tenets include that “the world is divided into nations, each with its own character, history and destiny ”; “the source of all political power is the nation, and loyalty to the nation overrides all other loyalties”; and “to be free, every individual must belong to a nation” (A. Smith 31). That is, each nation is as God wills it, so loyalty to the nation and prioritizing reciprocal care for one’s compatriots is obedience to God. As a means of sorting people and things into categories, nation-statism fulfills a basic human desire to think systematically about similarities 176 • Chapter 9 and differences. But for all their convenience, categories are imperfect and vulnerable to falsification by whatever they cannot neatly arrange. In her anthropological classic Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas borrows from Henry James to describe these unruly phenomena as “‘matter out of place’” or, more bluntly, “dirt” (qtd. in Douglas 165). Because dirt threatens the categories that make life...