Empire's edge and center: Nothing much about sex (Summer Road Musing #2)

Growing up in Colorado came with a steady dose of frontier mythology. And as other Western places, it also partakes in its fair share of exceptionalism. Fort Smith, Arkansas was no exception to that. It is certainly proud of its frontier heritage. More than once in my short time there, I was told that the small city had won the True West magazine's number one spot on its annual list of True Western Towns. 

It is also proud of its firsts and exceptions: the official US Marshals Service museum will be built here, and it also proudly shares that it hosts the only bordello on the national registry of historic places. Miss Laura's now houses the official visitors’ center. Visitors can get a little tour of the place and learn that for a time in the 1920s, the ‘social club’ was regulated by the local health department. 

By the looks of the health certificate (you get your very own when you visit!), the health department was making a pretty penny.

I was first told to visit Miss Laura's while in Hot Springs, Ark. For the woman who enthused about it as a destination, it seemed to give an insight into the lives of tough, independent working class women. This is not the only meaning the place has for people, for certain, but I am intrigued by the intrigue that ostensibly frank talk about sex and the lives of sex workers brought with it. On the tour, we saw the parlor and upstairs bedrooms (now housing tourism offices), and period clothes and furniture, and a few photographs and public health records. Nothing lurid like famous johns or raucous parties, so maybe the understatement was its own suggestion.  Or nothing much beyond the acknowledgement of sex work in this border place needed to be said as it taps into titillating narratives of bordellos in the Wild West.

The geek version that I imagine of this "bordello on the border" would open up the possibility for talking about the relations among the military, colonialism, and sex. But that is a different project than what I came here to look into. 

Summer Road Wander, Note #1

Fort Smith, Arkansas was a main destination for my summer road trip. Yes, the Fort Smith, and neighboring Fort Chaffee, that I maintain are at the center of the American empire.

Along the way, I meandered through Hot Springs, Arkansas. President Andrew Jackson created a natural reservation at Hot Springs in 1832 to preserve the healing qualities of water for the American people. He was simultaneously pursuing the forced removal of indigenous nations east of the Mississippi River and their relocation to new territories in the Indian Territories. (The formal reservation system would come later.)

What drew me to Hot Springs was not its mob town or boyhood-home-of-President-Clinton history. Instead, it was a little 'Did You Know?' note on Hot Springs' NPS website noting that the US Public Health Services had run a bathhouse and clinic in Hot Springs. I am always intrigued by instances when the US when government-run health services seem appropriate. 

Beyond Walls and Cages

Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis edited by Jenna Loyd, Matt Mitchelson & Andrew Burridge is now out! Beyond Walls and Cages develops abolitionist, no borders, and decolonial analyses and methods for social change.

Reviews

"Dares to undertake a task of political emergency that is here, now, and deeply historical . . . The thinkers in this collection catalyze a series of debates, conversations, and imaginative possibilities that stretch and vitally distend the existing horizons and languages of abolitionist, human/immigrant rights, prison reform, and U.S. border activisms. A mind-boggling array of critical positions, all informed by on-the-ground political work, is present in these pages. No one will walk away from this book unchanged."
—Dylan Rodríguez, author of Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime

"Bringing together immigrant justice and antiprison organizing, this volume offers an unusual and enlightening mix of writing by scholars, activists, and artists. There is not a lot available on migrant detention, and from what this book tells us it is on the increase, with record numbers of people detained."
—Jennifer Hyndman, author of Managing Displacement: Refugees and the Politics of Humanitarianism

Occupy // End the military’s occupations!: A love letter from Syracuse to Oakland

I’m on strike today in Syracuse, NY in solidarity with the general strike called in Oakland, California. When I read of the call to blockade the Port of Oakland as part of the general strike, I remembered a long history of anti-war blockades that have taken place here, with the support of Longshore workers, to stop US wars in Viet Nam, the Persian Gulf, Iraq, and Afghanistan. As happened last week at Oscar Grant Plaza, police forces responded to these protests with massive force. This evening, I went to court to witness the trial of the Hancock 38. Some of the 38 people arrested on April, 22, 2011 will be tried for blocking the entrance to Hancock Field to protest the Reaper drones that are piloted from the Air National Guard base near my home. Reaper drones are armed with missiles that are savaging the people of Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.

The power of the blockade is the power of stopping violence. There are other ways in which people come together to end state violence and impunity. It is significant that Occupy Oakland renamed the plaza they claimed after Oscar Grant. His death at the hands of the BART transportation police captures the stunning disregard for the lives of young Black men and other young people of color. His murder while waiting for the last train before midnight on a New Year’s Eve also captures the failure of public infrastructures to meet the needs of residents of the city, whether due to political recalcitrance or budget cuts.

I am on strike to write and reclaim my power to remember and share struggles between places that may not seem connected. The solidarity I see binding Oakland and Syracuse at this very moment is this shared undercurrent of opposition to far-away wars that are made from the places in which we live. Part of retaking and reshaping our cities means ending the military occupations of our cities and other people’s homelands. I want to connect some of the undercurrents of opposition to war, border militarization, and police occupations that are killing peoples and lands, separating families, and killing futures.

Finding the Border Prison Complex: Syracuse-Batavia-Attica-Belmont-Syracuse

I found my way through a little section of the migration-prison infrastructure of western New York recently. Batavia is about 12 miles north of Attica. And Belmont is south by about two hours from Batavia in the Southern Tier, the border with Pennsylvania. I had never been to these places. Attica is notorious. And it just so happened that I was driving through there on the anniversary of the 1971 uprising. I can only imagine, and expect to learn about, how Attica’s remote location faraway from loved ones in downstate New York makes that time inside more difficult. Batavia is not as notorious, but it’s where ICE detains and deports migrants who don’t have the right papers.


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Here’s what the travel process of posting bail looks like, if the judge allows them to post bail, and if they can come up with the money. For folks detained in this region, Batavia is where one goes to post bail regardless of where they’re actually held. On a pleasant fall day like the one I had, the drive to Batavia from Syracuse was about 1:45, with a little bit of thruway construction. Buffalo’s another 45 or so minutes west. There had been an ICE raid in Syracuse the week before where at least five guys were arrested. ICE claimed they were looking for one person, but, as is common practice, they rounded up other folks. After ICE took them into custody, they drove them to Batavia and then transferred them to county jail in Belmont, NY. Belmont is a tiny little town in Allegany County, a jurisdiction that decides to make a little extra cash by renting space in its jail to ICE to detain migrants. In 2006-2007, the Buffalo Detention Center in Batavia transferred over 40% of people to other facilities. The Allegany County Jail detained 179 immigrants during that year.