Deterritorialization

DeterritorializationRM

#essay, #deterritorialization, #onion

How deep could you peel an onion?

Ciudad Juarez had been, until the last decade of the XXth century, a peaceful border-city rooted in traditional values, which were in nature very gendered. A commerce treaty among the United States, Canada, and Mexico (NAFTA), introduced in 1994, permitted the manufacture of Canadian and American goods in Mexican territory for a much cheaper price than in their homelands. When the production plants began to recruit workers it became evident that employing women—who traditionally were stay-at-home mothers and were in charge of domestic labor— would allow for much lower wages. Their smaller hands and attention to detail, they argued, were also more appropriate for the tasks in the manufacturing processes. The employment of women, although under very precarious and oppressive conditions, shifted the domestic power structures. The role of men became subconsciously threatened as they ceased to be the sole providers of their households. Together with a wave of crescent violence related to drug trafficking women became targets of sexist behaviors and crimes that range from threats, sexual abuse, and murder, which persist until present time.

The flows of capital do not know any limitations to the territories it can transgress. We could think of, for example, an onion as a species of capital exploited by man, the capitalist, for his own benefit or greed. The prevalence and dissemination of the onion

is not more than the product of human obstinacy. Were the onion to have a mind, it could either feel cared for or violated, while its exploitation could induce either anxiety or pride.

An onion must be halved from the vertical axis after cutting off the upper and lower tips. As this aberrant movement traverses it and divides it into parts, the onion releases its only medium of self-defense, making the perpetrator release a tear. This last weep is an embodiment of a mourning that the onion cannot express on its own: The onion has lost its determining structure and finds itself, for a moment, in a space resembling a limbo; an unsafe, unknown territory. unknown value systems and social structures, the reassemblage is only richer and more fruitful for the top players of the capital game, rather than for the whole cosmos of ingredients. These forms of exploitative deterritorialization have proceeded to domesticate all species: Massive industrial agriculture has made the onion and incalculable fruits and vegetables more inherent to the plate than to land. Nature does not run freely, as humankind doesn’t either. Humans categorize, limit, and subjugate flora in their gardens, as they do to their own kind in prisons or manufacture plants. How deep should you peel an onion?

The time in between is full of expectation: A sliced, chopped, or diced onion promises more possibility in the transgression of its original shape than in its permanence. In culinary arts the disassembled onion encourages a process of non-linear re-assemblage, a system of relations without a center in an encoded territory. It promises a flavorful broth, a sweet and acidic base for multiple dishes. There is creative potential in the breaking of an onion’s body into an indiscernible pattern. This act could even be thought of as an act of liberation, as the diced layers can potentially gather into a richer and more diverse organization. Under these terms the onion seizes to belong to itself, the subject is shattered and rather becomes a spread-out unit in a larger assemblage. Its fragmented body begins to find new correlations and finds a new meaning to wholeness in contact with other and until then alien bodies. As the onion meets the buttered pan, individuality melts into a much pungent surface.

The human is, however, subject to much more impactful and complex forms of deterritorialization. The exploitation and transgression of human forms of life can be in fact more violent than promising, and does not guarantee reciprocity. When human-built landscapes are stripped from their core, and are reintroduced to