Invisible Prisoners: Indigenous Women Migrants and Human Rights in the Carceral State

In recent years much has been written about the multicultural reforms in Latin America and their impact on the lives of indigenous people.  Some analysts have noted that these reforms, while recognizing some rights for indigenous peoples, also respond to the neoliberal agenda of decentralizing the state and shifting responsibility to civil society for a variety of functions previously managed by the state, in a process that has been defined as the construction of neoliberal citizenship regimes. These critiques have inspired much research on the nature and workings of “neoliberal multiculturalism.” However, less attention has been given to the manner in which neoliberal multicultural reforms have been accompanied by reforms to the penal and immigration laws and policies that, in the name of “national security,” increasingly criminalize indigenous people both in their home communities and as they migrate across nation-state borders.   

This paper explores forms of violence on both sides of the US-Mexico border that affect the lives of indigenous women migrants from Mexico to the U.S. By exploring the experience of women who have been or are currently detained in the T. Don Hutto Immigration Detention Facility in Taylor, Texas, I will consider the complex relationship of neoliberalism, state authoritarianism, violence and human rights, as it plays out in the lives of indigenous women migrants. The violence that these women experience takes place on multiple registers, but is permeated at every level by ideologies of race, class, and gender. I will analyze the ways in which these ideologies translate into structural violence against indigenous women, rendering the rights offered by liberal democracy a chimera. By focusing on this process, I make an intervention in the discussion regarding the neoliberal state, highlighting the contradictions that exist between the rhetoric of rights recognition and the real justice spaces of the state.