Incarcerated Stories - (Critical Indigeneities) by Shannon Speed (Paperback)

About the Book

"Incarcerated stories uses ethnography and oral history to document and assess the plight of indigenous women migrants from Mexico and Central America to the United States. Their harrowing experiences of violence before, during, and after their migration parallel the worst stories we hear about immigrants' journeys; but as Speed argues, the circumstances for indigenous women are especially devastating against the backdrop of neoliberal economic and political reforms that have taken hold in Latin America as well as the U.S. First these women were promised greater autonomy and economic opportunity under reforms meant to promote indigenous rights at home, but the attention given to indigenous recognition veiled policies that furthered the economic disruption for women"--

Book Synopsis

Indigenous women migrants from Central America and Mexico face harrowing experiences of violence before, during, and after their migration to the United States, like all asylum seekers. But as Shannon Speed argues, the circumstances for Indigenous women are especially devastating, given their disproportionate vulnerability to neoliberal economic and political policies and practices in Latin America and the United States, including policing, detention, and human trafficking. Speed dubs this vulnerability "neoliberal multicriminalism" and identifies its relation to settler structures of Indigenous dispossession and elimination. Using innovative ethnographic practices to record and recount stories from Indigenous women in U.S. detention, Speed demonstrates that these women's vulnerability to individual and state violence is not rooted in a failure to exercise agency. Rather, it is a structural condition, created and reinforced by settler colonialism, which consistently deploys racial and gender ideologies to manage the ongoing business of occupation and capitalist exploitation.

With sensitive narration and sophisticated analysis, this book reveals the human consequences of state policy and practices throughout the Americas and adds vital new context for understanding the circumstances of migrants seeking asylum in the United States.

Review Quotes

"A heartbreaking ethnography. . . . Speed's work has important contributions to rethinking the role of the state and state power, the conditions of vulnerability, neoliberalism, multiculturalism, the relationship between state and violence and domestic violence, and settler-colonial logics. . . . [It] is also a reflection of successful interdisciplinary scholarship, which is, no doubt, the future of social science research and sociocultural anthropology."--Migration

"Presents in unflinching fashion the lived experiences of Indigenous women migrants seeking asylum. . . . Speed puts in the work to create a context for the reader in such a way that the uninitiated will have little trouble placing these stories into the existing conversation surrounding violence against Indigenous women."--Transmotion

"This bold, provocative, and very timely book . . . focuses on the experiences of indigenous women from Honduras, Guatemala, and southern Mexico who annually undertake the long, dangerous trek to the US border and beyond, fleeing poverty, violence, and repression. . . . Speed uses the stories she gathered to construct a broader and more intriguing argument about the structures of violence in which the boundaries between state and criminal are blurred. . . . An excellent entrée into any thoughtful study of the contemporary mess of US immigration policy and the experience of Central American immigrants to this country."--CHOICE

"Through rich, engaged ethnographic research conducted through visitation of Indigenous migrant women at the T. Don Hutto Immigration detention facility in Texas, Speed gathered stories of migrants from Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras who had made the journey to the United States. These 'incarcerated' stories form the basis of her succinct and theoretically sophisticated analysis exploring the violence resulting from enduring settler colonial state power and the embrace of neoliberal capitalism."--International Migration Review