Reimagining Home in the Context of Deportation and Neoliberal Reincorporation


Geraldina Polanco, McMaster University

The contemporary period is one of mass deportation, marked by state-led initiatives to expel “undesirables” from Western nations. The United States (US) has been at the forefront of instituting a deportation regime, with the bulk of evicted individuals being working-class, Caribbean, and Latin American men. By casting a wide net on deportable offences and shrinking discretionary powers and judicial reviews, the institutionalization of a deportation regime has been highly effective in facilitating removals, with over 6 million non-citizens deported from the US since 1996 (Ceciliano-Navarro and Golash-Boza, 2021). These evictions are having global, cascading effects, especially to countries with large flows of undocumented migrants. Salvadorans boast the second largest unauthorized population in the US, and El Salvador is the fourth most common destination for removals. US border enforcements have engendered the removal of those considered undesirable, namely working-class racialized men assumed to be inherent threats to the polity and nation. Relocating would-be delinquents through the process of deportation has functioned to criminalize, stigmatize, and blame deportees for social problems, both in the countries that expel and receive them. Latino men are largely banished due to a racialized fear of their delinquency, while in El Salvador they are stigmatized for presumably being criminals, failed migrants, and gang members. In a country like El Salvador, still reeling from the legacies of a twelve-year civil war (1979-92) and where the homicide rate has remained one of the highest in the Americas for decades, this landscape generates a hostile context of reception. Further, El Salvador is riddled by maras (street gangs), namely the MS-13 and Barrio 18: Latino gangs that originated in Los Angeles but took deep roots in El Salvador following the initial widespread deportation of Salvadorans in the 1990s. This is the context in which deportees—male and female—must incorporate. This SSHRC-funded project seeks to contribute to research on deportation and reintegration studies, taking El Salvador as a case study for analysis. Drawing from recent field research in El Salvador, I examine the institutional context of reception that deportees encounter upon return to El Salvador and examine what it means to be “welcomed home” after sometimes decades abroad. I illuminate how stereotypes of deportees, and the state migration apparatus in El Salvador imagine the “problem” of deportees and map the terrain of available repatriation services. I show how there are many shortcomings associated with the return migration apparatus, even though it is widely considered a model for other countries in the region. Most notably, significant energy goes into reincorporating migrants economically, including certifying their US experiences. However, questions of home–past and returned–are never adequately addressed, alongside the structural realities of reincorporating into the country. By scapegoating migrants for national economic failures, and failing to incorporate the entire subject, the question of home becomes an endless turmoil for the returnee. Especially in the face of a labour market characterized by high un- and underemployment, and where nearly two-thirds of the workforce toil in informal work.

This paper will be presented at the following session: