Comforter Art Action - Blanket Roll: sewing circles

(Photo - L. Klassen, Vancouver Welcome House, 2013)

On July 16 and 17, I hosted Pamela Calore during her first visit to Vancouver Canada. Calore traveled here from her home in San Diego where she is a photographer, teacher, and Outreach Coordinator with the advocacy group - Border Angels. To expand her understanding of Pan-American migration issues, she was eager to learn about how Canada was managing the migration of workers and displaced people from Mexico and Central America. So we visited two agencies in Vancouver: Settlement Orientation Services (SOS) and the Vancouver Welcome House and Settlement Services (ISS of BC) .

Whereas SOS offers counseling and legal support for people who make refugee claims once they arrive in Canada, ISS hosts those who have already been accepted by the Government of Canada as refugees before arriving. There are 800 or so who every year receive federal government support to become BC residents. Upon arrival a Welcome House bed is made available to them for about 2 weeks while their official paperwork is processed. During those whirl-wind days they are assisted by a person—overburdened it goes without saying—who assists them in finding an affordable place to rent using a meager monthly government stipend which will continue until they find work or for a year, whichever comes first. (http://thetyee.ca/News/2013/07/22/Safe-From-Violence-Seeking-Home/)

Back in the SOS office, the Spanish-speaking Settlement Workers seemed happy to have Pamela and me as visitors on short notice, in the middle of an idle summer afternoon. After Bill C-31 passed last December 15, and after Mexico joined the list of Designated Countries of Origin (DCO) on February 15 (Chile on May 15), the likelihood of Spanish-speaking people appearing in the SOS office to claim refugee status (or of those speaking Mayan languages, for whom the SOS workers are also prepared) is nearly non-existent. Under Bill C-31 if refugees have arrived by way of a DCO they will be returned to that country to seek asylum first, since the DCO list implies that these countries are "safe" and equipped to deal with incidents of persecution in legitimate ways; or, if they claim persecution despite originating in one of the DCOs, they will have a significantly truncated time (30 days) in order to prepare documents proving their persecution before appearing before a review panel. It appeared during our visit that Bill C-31 had effectively quieted the offices of settlement services workers.

"In the late 1980s this office was always full..." one of the settlement workers told us, describing some 30 years of on-going unrest in Guatemala and subsequent investment in mining by Canadian companies throughout Central and South America. He described how Canadian companies do not want Central American laborers to leave for higher paying work, and how Canadian agri-business wants to ensure a similarly low wage work force to be available in Canada under controlled circumstances, for seasonal work. He urged us to go to Langley and Abbotsford to meet with these foreign workers to find out about their working conditions –though, he said, we should expect to be intercepted by their company's security detail, who routinely accompany the workers into town for groceries, on days off.

Pamela and I wondered about which situation was worse: Canada's agenda to disappear from the citizenry economic migrants or asylum seekers by refusal of access – to hearings and advocacy; or, the violence of the US/Mexican border zone, that is revealed by organizations like Border Angels? At least in the US, I argued, there is now a generation of undocumented residents whose very presence in schools and workplaces and protests produces the conditions needed to defy the silencing.

Later, talking further about the conversations I had had with Pamela and the settlement workers, I was reminded of the way Judith Butler used the example of a 2006 Los Angeles demonstration by illegal immigrants to show how performativity defies the precarity of those denied legal status ("Performativity, Precarity and Sexual Politics" 2009). Butler recounted how the LA demonstrators had sung the national anthem of the United States in Spanish, as well as in English, and alongside the national anthem of Mexico. For Butler, these people were both performing as if they had a legal right to free expression even though they did not, and producing a situation in which their invisibility –in her words, illegibility—could be defied. They were just singing something American in Spanish, but by doing this in public, they were legitimizing the way Americans live in/with Spanish all the time. She described how they were exposing as well as opposing “those modes of exclusion through which the nation imagines and enforces its own unity”. Similarly, young activists who have grown up without legal documentation have been using the strategy of getting arrested to test deportation patterns. Their actions have exposed how there is poor on-the-ground compliance to federal government directives to only deport undocumented immigrants who have committed criminal offences. Once these activists –los infiltradores—are arrested and put inside detention facilities they have been successful in forcing deportation officers to release others who are detained but do not meet the official requirements for deportation. Their activism however depends on what one of them described as the theatre of the oppressed (Marco Saavedra, quoted by Michael May). In other words, the effectiveness of their work is dependent on the noisy crowd outside the detention centres who command the TV camera lenses, and appeal to the millions of American residents whose stories are echoed in the ones revealed to them by the activists.

In Canada there is silence resulting from effective avoidance or deflection into the US of a noisy population of illegible workers and children. Ironically, this silence was recently broken by a noise-producing incident in which a TV camera crew accompanied a Canada Border Services Agency raid of a Vancouver worksite in March 2013. Reversely making legible the condition of illegal workers in Vancouver--as well as the border officials’ highly questionable contract with a reality TV program, the incident produced significant public consternation and visibility of the “No One is Illegal” campaign (http://thetyee.ca/Blogs/TheHook/2013/03/14/Migrant-Arrests/).

The 11 blankets that Pamela Calore carried in a used hockey bag from Vancouver to a men's shelter for migrant men in Tijuana are not that noisy (see Blanket Roll # 101 - 111 in the left side bar). But like the water stations that are resourced by the volunteers and often visiting scholars that come to Border Angels to learn more about the border issues, the blankets materialize for those of us who make them the silent, and often failed, migration of people away from poverty, across the often failed national lines.

Lois Klassen, Vancouver

(Thank you to Lexi Owen and Margaret Dragu for the conversations and resources that I drew from for this post! - LK)