shag carpet bomb wrote:
>
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> -
> I'm cutting out here because I want to highlight the word she used: travel.
> Instead of talking about this in terms of migrancy, which signifies a kind
> of transiency en route to someplace else, an eventual settling, Agustin's
> keen to write about these folks as travelers which implies a rather
> different idea more of a sense of agency, I think, less of a sense of
> victimization.
For 30+ years tons of ink have been expended on this theme of not treating people as victims, that it deprviives them of "agency." But why can't agents be victims and victims be agents? I remember my grandmother talking about her memory of her grandmother, who would stand in the front yard of her daughter's home gazing easteard towards her old home in (I think) Cornwall. She was an agent o.k., but working conditions in England in the mid-19th-century had damn well "victimized" her. And I don't see why one shouldn't say so.
And about 20+ years ago a Guatemalan migrant talked here in B/N (brought here by our CISPES chapter), acoompanied by his translator. I can't remember his whole story now; a number of moving from one place to another several times at home, and each time in the new place (one of which was newly opened territory) the slaughter began again. Several members of his family had been killed. In the middle of his speech he broke down crying: he wanted to be home! He didn't want to be in the fucking u.s.a. but he had run all the way from Guatemala just to stay alive. (He was an 'illegal' migrant.)
It does not deprive that man of agency to call him a victim. He fucking well was avictim AND an agent. It deprives him of agency NOT to call him an agent who was a victim.
Carrol