Uncertain Citizenship. Megan Ryburn
support from a migrant organization) and structural factors (such as changes to immigration law, perhaps precipitated by recommendations from an international body). A change in one may result in a change in another, although not necessarily.
In this way, many migrants are neither entirely citizens nor “noncitizens,” nor are they in a clearly delineated “third space” of citizenship. Rather, as the stories that unfold in the pages ahead illustrate, there is an unpredictable quality to their experiences of citizenship across multiple dimensions. In relation to each of these dimensions, and spanning them, there is a sense of ambiguity, of instability, and sometimes of fear, but also a whisper of possibility. They live uncertain citizenship.
2
Places of Uncertain Citizenship
In the room where my niece lives you can fit a double bed and a single, and nothing else. And we all squashed in there, and we lived four grown-ups and a little girl. Five people…. In the single bed, there was my husband, me, and we put a soft toy or something alongside so that if we rolled off, we’d fall on that. I mean, it’s not a bed, it’s a mattress on the floor. We were like that for March, April, May, about two months while we looked for another room. April was when my sister arrived. Then in that same room it was my niece, her husband, my husband and me, my sister, and two children. There were seven of us.
—DIANA, AGE TWENTY-EIGHT, FROM SANTA CRUZ, BOLIVIA
As the late, great Doreen Massey contended, “If space is … a simultaneity of stories-so-far, then places are collections of those stories, articulations within the wider power-geometries of space.”1 That is to say, places do not preexist but rather are formed and reformed through social interactions and interventions by institutions.2 They are not abstract. They are made manifest through embodiment, understood and created through the physical, experiential, and emotional.3 Places are consequently comprehended in a variety of ways by different people, but they also have shared meaning.
For Diana and many others, there were certainly particular places—like the inner-city tenement housing she describes in this chapter’s opening quotation—that were tangible expressions of their collected migration stories-so-far. It is imperative to grasp a sense of these places in order to comprehend how uncertain citizenship affects migrants in their daily lives. So prior to embarking on a discussion in the rest of the book of the construction of and interactions between the “wider power geometries” of spaces of citizenship, this chapter provides a grounding in the lived reality of uncertain citizenship.
Combining migrants’ accounts with my own participant observation through an iterative process, I slowly began to map the connections among what I came to understand as “places of uncertain citizenship,” six of which I discuss here.4 All, to borrow from Rob Shields, are places on the margins—in some cases literally on the geographic periphery, such as on the border at Lago Chungará, and in other cases figuratively peripheral to the center of society, as with the migrant cités (tenement housing) located in the heart of the capital city.5 They are places that perform a clever trompe l’oeil, being at once invisibilized and yet highly visible. And thus they are places of liminality, full of “ambiguity and paradox.”6
THE BOLIVIAN-CHILEAN BORDER
AT LAGO CHUNGARÁ
The physical geography of Lago Chungará marks it as somewhere outside normal paradigms. One of the highest lakes in the world, it sits at forty-five hundred meters above sea level. The altiplano landscape that surrounds it is splendidly dramatic, covered in pampa and snowy peaks; grazed by llama, alpaca, and vicuña; and a feeding ground for flamingo. I approached the Chungará–Tambo Quemado border crossing on my first journey there for this research in a fog of dizziness after briefly passing out on the bus due to our rapid ascent from sea level in Arica. My altitude sickness on that journey contributed to the sense of almost surreality engendered by the contrast between the dark green militarization of the border guards and the impossible blueness of the sky and the beauty of the place. Chungará seemed a shimmering mirage perched in the cordillera, yet it also was a place where weighty decisions regarding the movement of people were being enforced every day.
As a nexus point on the triple frontera (triple frontier) joining Chile, Peru, and Bolivia, its present is imbued with a history of conflict and unease. It is part of a borderland that holds deep importance in the national imaginaries of these three neighbors. The boundaries of Chile, Peru, and Bolivia were drastically redrawn following the War of the Pacific (1879–1883), and the consequences have been far-reaching. The war was a product of tensions among the three nations that evolved in conjunction with the discovery around the 1840s of rich guano deposits and salitre (sodium nitrate) on the Pacific coast and in the Atacama Desert in what was then southern Peru, Bolivia’s littoral territory, and the top of northern Chile (see map 2). Tensions escalated to crisis point in February 1879. The Chilean government occupied the port of Antofagasta—at that point part of Bolivia—with the ironclad vessel Blanco Encalada in response to a fierce dispute over Bolivian taxation of a Chilean nitrate exploitation company operating in Bolivian territory. Shortly thereafter Bolivia declared war on Chile. As a result of signing a “secret” pact with Bolivia in 1873, Peru became embroiled in the conflict on the Bolivian side following a failed attempt to mediate, and in April 1879 war was declared on Bolivia and Peru by the Chilean congress.
MAP 2. Territorial boundaries of Chile, Peru, and Bolivia before the War of the Pacific. Credit: Bill Nelson, 2017.
The war was long and protracted, with neither the Chilean side nor the Peruvian-Bolivian alliance willing to back down. While Bolivia had effectively exited the war by 1881, Peru continued fighting until 1883. Peru negotiated the Treaty of Ancón with Chile that same year, following extended Chilean occupation of Lima. In 1884 Bolivia and Chile reached an official truce, and they signed the Treaty of Peace and Friendship in 1904, essentially confirming the conditions of that truce. Under these agreements Chile took possession of Bolivian and Peruvian territory up to and including Arica and Tacna, thus leaving Bolivia landlocked and increasing the size of Chile by one-third (see map 3). In the Treaty of Peace and Friendship it was agreed that Bolivia would have access to the now Chilean ports of Arica and Antofagasta, that Bolivian imports through these ports would not be taxed, and that Bolivia could establish its own customs houses there. A railroad would also be built by Chile to link Arica to La Paz; this was completed in 1913.7
MAP 3. Contemporary map of Chile, Peru, and Bolivia. Credit: Bill Nelson, 2017.
Part of the agreement laid out in the Treaty of Ancón was that a plebiscite would be held in 1893 to decide the future of Arica and Tacna, according to the wishes of those residing there. This date came and went, however, with no attempt made at a vote. After years of discussion, in 1925 plans were finally made for a plebiscite, to be overseen by representatives from the United States. This was canceled in 1926 by the US representatives after what was described by plebiscitary commissioner general William Lassiter as a “state of terrorism” descended on the region in the period preceding the planned vote.8 While violent acts were committed by both Peru and Chile as they sought to establish their national identity in the area, much of the violence was perpetrated by Chile. Effectively since the signing of the Treaty of Ancón, but increasingly during the period from 1910 onward, Chile had begun a process of “Chileanization” in the region.
The Chilean national identity that such actions sought to affirm promoted the homogeneity of Chile based on the “whiteness” of Chileans as opposed to the “Indian” or “mestizo” Peruvians, who were cast as an inferior Other. Peruvian schools, churches, and press outlets were closed; the Chilean military