Culture and Migration, Jeffrey H. Cohen

Jeffrey H. Cohen

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Culture and Migration

“Culture and Migration” explores bigotry in transnational space and addresses the challenge: to describe the universal nature of mobility and how movers respond to competing forces (positive and negative).

Migrants, refugees and the displaced rebuild, invent and define new kinds of identities. These identities are constructed around mobilities, and often contradictory forces that can create insecurities for movers.

It is critical in this moment to follow these movers, investigate their mobilities and examine the challenges they face.

The late 1980s and 1990s was a time filled with hope and excitement. Violence and war were not vanquished, terror and hate continued but it was a moment when the world seemed set to change for the better. Walls were breached, borders were unsealed and boundaries fell as the Cold War ended. Europe opened and there was hope that around the globe nations might follow. Unfortunately the future that seemed so bright never truly materialized and in the last few years we have lived through an intensification of xenophobia and the criminalization, whether real or imagined, of movers and refugees in the Americas, Europe and around the world. To challenge the xenophobia and criminalization of movers, a few examples are relevant that capture the ways in which migrants and refugees build alternative spaces. I being with the example of Syrian refugees living in the Zaatari camp in Jordan, and the experiences of Oaxaqueños (from the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca) as they migrate to the US. The examples of Syrian refugees and Oaxaqueños shows that these different groups follow different mobilities that are separated not only by space but, by unique insecurities and outcomes; yet in each case people are creating spaces where identities are constructed and diversity celebrated.

Mobility is not the same for Syrians and Mexicans. Sometimes we are focused on long-term trends, and Mexican migration to the US is defined by well over 100 years of history. However, there are times when events happen quickly as in the example of the Syrian refugees who are internally displaced, living in camps or transiting through Turkey and Greece on their way to destinations in Europe. The challenges that Syrians face are immediate and embedded in the ongoing violence that effects every aspect of life. Oaxaqueños have migrated for generations traveling to nearby cities, boomtowns and crossing into the US. For nearly 30 years, I have had the opportunity to work with and write about these movers.1 ( Yet, there are parallels that exist and challenge modern day movers—whether Syrian refugees or Mexican migrants.

To understand how movers respond to the challenges they face, the idea from James Scott, author of work in political science and Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. 2 Scott argues that peasants are able to counter (or resist) exploitation through everyday acts that are organized around shared beliefs that effectively challenge marginalizing and exploitative relationships with figures of power. Building upon Scott’s idea, our discussions of movers and the way they organize themselves defines how they use identity to challenge xenophobia and mischaracterization by the state and media. In other words, the folks we are discussing define everyday forms of identity and celebrate everyday forms of diversity that celebrate social justice and offer alternative narratives of life.

The Za’atari refugee camp in Jordan is home to almost 100,000 Syrian refugees.3 The project, organized by the artist and UNICEF in partnership with local Syrian artists and educators, is dedicated to creating a safe space for refugee children to continue their educations and give voice to their experiences, hopes and dreams.

The children talk about their feelings of loss and fears of violence. They also worry about educational opportunities missed, and the challenges they face as they try to learn. The Za’atari project engages these children and creates bridges that create an opportunity for education that is free of violence yet confronts realities to establish a future based on dreams and hopes.

1. The Culture of Mi-

gration in Southern Mexico (University of Texas Press, 2005).

2. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (Yale University Press, 1987).

3. See images from Joel Bergner’s website documen-

ting mural art at the Za’atari camp (https://joelartista. com/syrian-refu-

gees-the-zaatari-project-jordan/).

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From a mural arts project with Syrian youth in the Za’atari Refugee Camp in Jordan facilitated by Joel Artista, co-director of Artolution, who partnered with aptART, ACTED, Mercy Corps and UNICEF in 2014. © Joel Artista

The Za’atari project and other programs like it are important because they confront the violence and insecurities that have displaced Syrians and drive refugees to leave their homelands. Yet, the projects do not dwell on these insecurities, rather they celebrate the dreams these children have. The Za’atari project and others like it give refugee children the opportunity to respond to the destructive and despairing images common in the press. In the process, the refugees are humanized. Through these programs refugee children remind us that they are people and with their fellow refugees they share our humanity.

The Za’atari project and others like it remind us that we do not need to fear refugees. These children are celebrating everyday forms of diversity and everyday forms of identity that reveal the realities of life in the camps and the violence and insecurities that civil war has created. The efforts of programs like the Za’atari project are wonderful examples of defining the strength that comes with the celebration of diversity. Moreover, the Za’atari project and the challenges that face Syrian refugees are one example of how to rethink mobility.

The second example comes from work done in Oaxaca. I started working in Southern Mexico in the late 1980s, and I’ve continued to explore issues of migration for close to 30 years now.

An interest in how people organize themselves around the challenges of migration, ecological and economic change as well as how they balance their personal desires with expectations and the limited opportunities that typically defined their lives motivated the work.4

My work on migration is based, in part, on speaking against the popular perception of Mexican migrants as dangerous. Even politicians running for high office describe migrants as dangerous. This position is patently wrong yet it continues to echo among a public that does not understand migration. I tested the assumption that migration was dangerous and destructive and specifically explored how Oaxaqueños built upon their cultural traditions as they migrated to the U.S. I asked questions about the kinds of cooperative relationships and reciprocal ties that people had in their home communities and how they used those relationships as migrants. The cooperative relation-

4. This work is done with Ibrahim Sirkeci. Cultures of Migration: The Global Nature of Contemporary Mobility (University of Texas Press, 2011).

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372 ships people had ranged from informal ties of the sort seen when members of families help each other, to very formal relationships that define village life and that families enter into with each other, their community and country.

If migration was a problem, the relationships that defined local village life would most likely disappear. That did not happen. Oaxaqueños did not turn their backs on the past and their traditions, rather they reinvented those traditions in new and interesting ways. Like the Syrian refugees I described above, Oaxaqueños practiced everyday forms of identity that allowed them the opportunity to rethink who they were and how they fit into a changing world. In the process they practiced everyday forms of diversity that celebrated their lives and (perhaps more importantly) challenged the fears of outsiders and assumptions that migrants were dangerous.

Oaxaqueños playing basketball (left page). © Jeffrey Cohen

Oaxaqueños playing basketball. © Bernardo Rios

Jeffrey H. Cohen

374 Having found these patterns in refugee camps and rural villages doesn’t mean that there were no fights or disagreements. There were plenty of both and people regularly were angry with each other and with outsiders but that’s part of life. Whether living in a refugee camp in Jordan or a small rural village in southern Mexico, life is often defined by tension. Our goal is not to eliminate that tension, but to show how it is negotiated and managed. The Oaxaqueños under study rethought their identities around migration so that it wasn’t a disruptive force, but rather one pathway to the future. In Oaxaca, migration became a way not only to survive, but to usher in community renaissance.

Discovering how community is reinvented and reorganized is something that a lot of us working with movers have found. It isn’t simply about the big moments, it is in the everyday acts of diversity and identity that we see opportunity. The examples range from making a mural in a Jordanian refugee camp to throwing a fiesta in Mexico.

Oaxaqueños blend the past and the present as they create and celebrate their identity, specifically through basketball. These photographs capture young men and women as they play.

The first includes men who are dressed up as “danzantes” (Aztec dancers), who are part of the “Danza de la pluma”—a folk dance done in the village during religious celebrations. Danzantes are playing basketball, and reinventing the past as they create a new present. The men of the village accomplish a similar outcome as they team build upon traditional reciprocal ties and become a structure for contemporary forms of cooperation.

A former student, Bernardo Rios, documented young Oaxaqueños playing basketball in California. Bernardo’s photograph captures everyday forms of diversity and identity. These young men and women are reinventing themselves for themselves and for outsiders as well. They are celebrating what it means to be Oaxaqueño but doing so in a part in southern California.

The players, young and old, engage each other in relationships that are rooted in the cooperative experiences of their parents and grandparents that took place in rural Oaxacan communities,

places that may be unknown to them today. Reorganized around basketball, these young men rely on their relationship to live and to connect and the links extend beyond the Oaxaqueños who are playing to include Latinos from throughout the Americas.

The experiences of Syrian refugees and Oaxaqueño migrants is not always positive. There are absolute moments when violence and destruction overwhelm movers and flattens them in place. There are, and we all know examples of this, migrants who are profiled and arrested, discriminated against and relocated against their will or forced to take jobs that are well below their skills and education.

The hopeful examples of everyday forms of identity and diversity are organized against the backdrop of discrimination, violence, and insecurity that is systematic. How we can write against, work against and challenge this systematic, exclusionary discrimination? Our words and efforts can stand with refugees, migrants and movers to challenge the politicians who want to describe Mexicans as criminals and Syrians as terrorists.

UNESCO describes human rights as a way in which groups and societies find opportunities to express diverse modes of artistic creation, production, dissemination, and distribution. This is part of that process of writing against or working against those forces that want to say “no” to refugees and migrants. Celebrating everyday forms of diversity and identity can be scary. In the United States, people campaign on the fear of difference, but it’s the fear that we have to challenge every day, and it’s in the everyday moments: creating murals, playing basketball that we can begin.

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