“Excuse me!” Eugenia1 said bravely. “I'm not a hooker!”
When she was in her early 30s, having just started her small housekeeping business, a man contacted her via her website, giving her directions to his multimillion beachside house in San Diego, Southern California. After she stepped inside, the man revealed that he was not really looking for a cleaner. She recalls him telling her, “I need a woman and if you kiss me, I will pay you.”
For many Women of Color and Indigenous women like Eugenia, living near the world's busiest and thus heavily surveilled border means constantly being identified with and exposed to insecurity. As Gloria Anzaldúa notes, “Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them” (1987: 3, emphasis in the original). Paradoxically, while strong borders and draconian migration policies are often touted as a cornerstone of national security, they in fact often produce insecurity by making smuggling and trafficking more lucrative (Jusionyte 2021). Thus, borderlands are spaces where contradictory discourses and practices intersect and processes of marginalization become visible. It is a well-trodden insight that borders are founded on violence and require violence, or the threat of it, to be maintained (Besteman 2020). This violence takes on gendered forms, such as the sexual violence involved in the founding of nations (Das 2008). Therefore, if borderlands represent at once the margins of the colonialist state and the imagined center of its security politics, Women of Color and Indigenous women are the marginalized within the margins, ambivalently representing illegality and insecurity at the same time as their Othering and “dirty work” is crucial to the stability of borderland economies, and thus inhabit an ambivalent place in the security imagination. In the case of the US-Mexico borderlands, Anzaldúa observes, if a Mexican woman is unauthorized and does not speak English, “American employers are quick to take advantage of her helplessness. She can't go home” (Anzaldúa 1987: 12).
Now in her late 40s, Eugenia partly blames what happened on her youthful lack of watchfulness: “I was not really aware, I was, like, so young that I don't have a lot of experience.” Since then, she has become cautious when accepting new clients: “when a guy mail-contacts me [I make sure that there is] a female wife or somebody else, like a member [of the] family that I can give the estimate.” Eugenia also blames the public perception of housekeeping as “a low job.” She finds it hurtful that some people think that cleaners are ready to “do anything for money, when it's wrong.” She considers herself a business owner. Just as she respects her job, she expects “that people respect my job and give me, you know, respect.”
Eugenia's story reveals respect as a security practice. It protects her against the expectation of sexual and economic exploitability that affects Mexican-American women who do not match the stereotype of the monolingual Spanish-speaking unauthorized migrant. Far from helpless, they often actively challenge the expectations of those who want to take advantage as a kind of security practice. Stereotypes and the “low” image of cleaning as a working-class, racialized, and gendered profession are a source of insecurity as they put housekeepers at risk of sexual harassment and other forms of mistreatment and insecurity. However, among domestic workers, professionalization and respectability may be interpreted as a kind of security practice as they have long been perceived as having the potential to counter the negative public image of cleaning as “dirty work,” which also allows the workers themselves to find pride in doing their work well (Salzinger 1997).
How do Mexican-American women in the US-Mexico borderlands who have experienced racism, violence, and marginalization respond to insecurity? How are their lifeworlds affected by (in)security, and which strategies do they deploy in order to realize “security” in the face of multiple forms of discrimination? We will address these questions by engaging with the experiences of women of different class and ethnic backgrounds to crystallize their gendered watchfulness vis-à-vis violent men, the patriarchal and militarized structures of the state that direct authorities’ surveillance and citizens’ vigilance against them, and social life more broadly, where these women are often subject to the racialized and classed anti-immigrant vigilance of middle and upper-class Anglo-Americans.
Informed by 15 months of fieldwork on vigilance among San Diegan Latinos and Latinas,2 this article focuses on two case studies of Mexican-American women with complex class identities whose cleaning practice diverges from the dominant cliché. One is Eugenia, who is a professional running her own housekeeping business, and the other is Alejandra, a performance artist whose character “Juana” is a cleaning lady and whose performances typically take place in public places, such as museums. Despite both of them having Mexican backgrounds, and both having experiences of gender-based violence and racist discrimination, their gendered watchfulness is expressed through strategies and concepts that diverge along class and educational lines. The differences that emerge in our feminist decolonial analysis show clearly that Mexican-American women are far from being a homogenous group. At the same time, the gendered similarities in their experiences of living in the borderlands challenge and expand dominant understandings of security. Their security strategies from the margins of the margins as borderland women instead draw attention to aesthetic practices, often challenging expectations, as well as professionalization and respectability as vernacular security strategies. Combined with watchfulness and learning from past experiences, we argue that these notions represent key aspects of Mexican-American women's security strategies yet are rarely discussed in the broader literature on security.
We will begin by discussing our concepts and stressing the nexus of security-making and watchfulness from a feminist decolonial perspective. Mexican-American women's vigilance is not primarily a defensive or exclusively reactive strategy, but one that challenges existing power relations in order to open up pathways of creating alternative social worlds. We will then contextualize housekeeping work in the security landscape of the US-Mexico borderlands. Returning to Eugenia's story will allow us to demonstrate that cleaning is not, as it is stereotypically perceived, necessarily a job that people do when they are desperate and have no other options. On the contrary, for Eugenia, we will show that it has been a pathway to freedom and empowerment from multiple intersecting forms of injustice. We then turn to the case of Alejandra and her reasons for performing cleaning as an artist. Her character Juana's interactions with the white high society of San Diego disrupt the gendered, racialized, and classist normalization of the marginalization of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans through their interlocking invisibilization (by day) and surveillance (by night) in predominantly white spaces. Next, we will analyze these case studies as security strategies in the borderland context more broadly. Building on María Lugones (2007) and Nancy Fraser (2022), we argue that, in a context of ongoing coloniality, maintaining an exploitable racialized and gendered sub-worker class requires conjuring the illusion of the border as a necessary security feature. Mexican-American women's watchfulness instead makes visible the ways in which the border as the margin of the state and the patriarchal and colonialist white supremacist social order it represents actively produces insecurity and violence, which in turn makes visible the ambivalent effects of margins. This will lead us to conclude that viewing security from the margins of the margins allows us to expand and critique previous understandings in a decolonial vein.
Cleaning and Watchfulness: A Feminist Decolonial Perspective
Security issues are center stage in the racialized and harsh migration politics at the US-Mexico border. This region is saturated with discourses, practices, materialities, and technologies related to security that seek to protect an imagined nation from potential, often criminalized, “intruders.” The notion of a borderland is thus tied to the socio-spatial dimension of (in)security, encompassing concrete infrastructure, but also imaginaries and affects, such as fear (Maguire and Low 2019: 8, 13). Further, non-state actors are involved in security-making by turning into alert and watchful citizens in the service of the state. This top-down approach resonates with Foucault's model of the panopticon and governance (Foucault 1977), while also pointing to vigilance as inherent in securitization processes.
Vigilance has been conceptualized as a component of vernacular security strategies that can be instrumentalized for political goals and as a means to denounce perceived threats (Codaccioni 2021; see also Ivasiuc et al. 2022; Brendecke 2018). This linking to goals beyond those of the individuals involved occurs on an everyday basis, for instance in the realm of public security, when citizens are asked to pay attention to something specific and, if necessary, to report their observations. Dominant cultures of vigilance that are aligned with state institutions and other power holders typically place less attention on the watchfulness of non-state actors who are marginalized individuals, instead often making them the object of close observation. As a response, marginalized individuals themselves become watchful and employ watchfulness as a strategy to cope with their experiences of harassment and discrimination. As we have shown elsewhere (Dürr et al. 2023; Whittaker et al. 2023), these processes are particularly prominent in the US-Mexico borderlands and foster political subject formation toward empowerment and decolonization of people who are under observation and discriminated against. Their counter-watchfulness serves to establish a sense of security for themselves and for their community and thus challenge attempts to dominate and discipline them. Thus, vigilance can work in multiple ways—it can strengthen political power and hegemony but has also the potential to challenge these (Whittaker and Dürr 2022).
In what follows, we explicitly relate gender, watchfulness, and security and discuss how the watchfulness of marginalized actors intersects with gender and security-making. Drawing on a feminist decolonial perspective, we reveal how female-read bodies are exploited and threatened by a violent hegemonic, hyperconsumerist colonialist, and (hetero)patriarchal system that commodifies, objectifies, and dehumanizes them (Valencia 2018) and how this is related to embodied strategies of vernacular security. We argue that corporality highlights and challenges perceived gendered differences. As Philipp Naucke and Ernst Halbmayer point out in the introduction to this Special Issue, anthropological research on non-state security actors has so far focused primarily on private security actors, vigilante groups, or gangs (Grassiani and Diphoorn 2017: 2), which means largely male actors (see, e.g., Baird 2015; Hume and Wilding 2015). If Indigenous groups are marginalized within security discourse, then Indigenous women and Women of Color, as well as genderqueer individuals, are the marginalized among the marginalized. Among them, female cleaners are a particularly vulnerable and invisibilized group. Here, we stress the genderedness of security and watchfulness specifically, thus extending existing conceptual approaches. We draw our arguments from in-depth case studies and deploy a feminist decolonial perspective to security-making and watchfulness to our ethnographic work. In the borderland context, the women we studied were subject to white (racist) vigilance and became watchful themselves in this process. However, their watchfulness as marginalized borderland women was often an unconscious, embodied security practice. This became obvious in conversations when interviewees struggled to engage with the concept directly but realized upon reflection that it did play a significant role in their lives.
As “cleaning” is as a highly gendered kind of domestic work that is strongly associated with structural vulnerability, we see this as a particularly useful vantage point for exploring the nexus of women's watchfulness and security-making. This resonates with Mary Douglas’ (1991) seminal work on purity and danger, in which she points to the threatening character of dirt as conveying disorder and boundary transgressing—and thus having the potential to de-stabilize the social order. Both objects and subjects who do not fit socially constructed categories are seen as suspicious and therefore require observation. In her view, material and symbolic aspects of dirt and cleansing are intertwined, as getting rid of dirt has a purifying quality and helps to (re)establish order. Thus, cleaning can be seen as more than the removal of a specific materiality (e.g., dirt) but also as a highly ordering process that helps to establish security versus uncertainty and disorientation. Individuals involved in “dirty work”, such as cleaners, are often seen as being dirty and suspicious themselves (Dürr and Jaffe 2014).
However, as Megan Raschig's (2022) work on Chicana-Indigenous women in California highlights, the stigmatized bodies of (cleaning) Women of Color are not only sites of particular vulnerability and stress. They are also sites of political resistance and self-care as vernacular security strategies from the margins when these women engage in healing practices, self-defense techniques, and eventually in civil rights movements. We argue that these processes are closely linked to security-making and highlight the importance of self-care and community care as well as the making of kin relations. The case studies in this article reveal the pivotal role of peer-to-peer attention to creating security, beyond top-down surveillance and state interventions. This is in line with what Patty Sotirin, Victoria Bervall and Diane Shoos have reframed as feminist vigilance that is “care-based, relational and, ultimately, a hopeful conception and strategy” (Sotirin et al. 2021: viii). Such analyses frame women's looks as a mode of care and resistance in opposition to white supremacy, patriarchy, and state violence (Doughty et al. 2023; Haynes 2023). The empowering and security-making potential of watchfulness emerges from the experiences of violence and injustices by seeking alternatives to white supremacy and privilege. This stance is grounded in a commitment to equity, and, as we will show through our ethnography, achieved by watching over others and oneself.
Cleaning for Freedom and Empowerment: Female Migrants and Migrantized Women
While San Diego is known as a clean, fun “vacationland” in the sun, Tijuana, San Diego's twin city across the border, is often stereotyped and stigmatized as a polluted place to visit for sex and drugs as well as “a gateway for countless illegal migrants” (Mayhew 2005: 272–273). Despite the increasing criminalization of immigrants since the 1990s, San Diego's economy depends on migrant labor from Mexico, as many jobs fail to pay a living wage, including both unauthorized migrants and those who legally cross back and forth from Tijuana for work every day (Yeh 2018).
Border crossing is a profoundly gendered practice with gendered outcomes. In Mexico, many “(m)en are expected to migrate, and the masculinity of those who do not go north is called into question” (Boehm 2012: 73). For women, crossing the border involves even higher stakes. While fleeing from violence often motivates migration, women are often revictimized on the migrant trail (Schmidt and Buechler 2017). According to Amnesty International's estimate, up to 60 percent of women are raped during transit through Mexico (Shetty 2014). Border towns like Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez offer gendered work in maquiladoras that attracts young women from other parts of Mexico and places them at risk of becoming crime victims, including femicide victims (Gamlin 2021).
Yet the United States is no safe haven. Vera, the founder of an NGO that supports monolingual Spanish-speaking immigrant women who are leaving abusive partners to navigate the US legal system reported in an interview that many Latina immigrants distrust the police as security agents. If they are undocumented, they are particularly fearful of authorities, so that they are very unlikely to report abuse.
Apart from being particularly vulnerable to intimate violence, recently immigrated women are also vulnerable to economic exploitation, including by other women. As Eugenia described in a conversation at her cozy, spotless home in East San Diego, she has a “friend” who “brings people from Tijuana, girls, to work for her and she pay(s) less than minimum wage and she is from TJ, she is legal here, but [. . .] she's taking advantage of them. And I don't think that's okay.” According to Eugenia, security for some in terms of having a secure legal status can be weaponized against others by reproducing structures of dependency and insecurity.
Eugenia experienced this combined vulnerability first-hand. When she was 17, Eugenia crossed the border by bus from Mexico City. When she arrived in Texas, her father, from whom she had been estranged, refused to enroll her in school, instead forcing Eugenia to work as a maid. Soon, he began molesting her, while also calling her “ugly” for allegedly being “too Black.” He denigrated her Indigenous traits, himself being of a lighter complexion reminiscent of his European ancestry. To prevent Eugenia from running away, he even put electricity on the fence surrounding their house. One day, she managed to escape. Even though she didn't speak English at the time, she was able to persuade a family she knew to stay with them in exchange for care work. She soon learned English and finished her high school degree. Eventually, she became a US citizen.
Cleaning has never been Eugenia's dream career. Her well-to-do Mexican relatives look down on this kind of work, which they regard as being suited only to Indigenous young women, which is a common assumption across many parts of Latin America (Gill 1994). This assumption implies that the latter are the underclass of society and must therefore carry out the work that others do not want. Yet for Eugenia, cleaning offered freedom, both in the sense of economic independence, self-determination, and flexibility with her time, in a way that other jobs did and do not. As Pierette Hondagneu-Sotelo (1994: 152) has highlighted, Mexican cleaning women often “maintain several employers and clean different houses on a weekly or biweekly basis, generally in exchange for a flat rate of pay. These arrangements allow for independence and mitigate deeply personalistic employer-employee relations—one of the potentially most abusive aspects of this type of labor.” While Eugenia has experienced abusive clients, she finds confidence in being able to walk away from, and speak out against, such mistreatment and finding new clients. For example, “a lot of my clients when they reach (out to me) for estimates the first time, the impression they have about me, it's like, ‘Oh she's from TJ, we don't have to pay a lot’.”
The freedom that cleaning houses affords Eugenia became more evident when she lost it by moving to another state with her former fiancé, Derrick, a white Anglo-American. She invested all her savings into the house they bought together. Thus, when Derrick's abusive behavior became intolerable, subjecting her to racist anti-immigrant comments, sexual withdrawal, and even physical violent outbursts, Eugenia could not afford to leave.
Fortunately, a neighbor, an older woman, had observed Eugenia's unhappiness and gave her the money to travel back to San Diego. Once there, she re-started her housekeeping business, found some clients, and slowly rebuilt her life. Just as networks help to ensure the safety of female migrants (Schmidt and Buechler 2017), Eugenia's story shows that women's networks remain a crucial security strategy at the margins long after they arrived in the United States.
Yet despite the economic advantages of cleaning, Eugenia's livelihood remains vulnerable to unforeseen events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, and the whims of her employers. One key way in which she seeks to manage this economic insecurity is through unsolicited care and favors, such as surprising one of her clients with a pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving. The client was flustered and responded, “You didn't have to.” Yet Eugenia feels that being generous with others is a matter of “good karma.” This building of reciprocity networks is a key element in her strategies of security-making.
Another ambivalent security practice that Eugenia employs daily is linked to the aesthetic realm and her bodily appearance. Even when in a great hurry, Eugenia never leaves her house without applying full makeup, and usually, she also styles her hair and gets regular manicures. She keeps in shape through her diet and exercise, even paying thousands for cosmetic procedures. In the summer, she typically wears long sleeves to prevent her arms from getting “too dark.” What may seem as an exacting beauty regime stems from her determination to never be labeled as “ugly” again and reveals the body as a site where differences and identities are negotiated. The fear of her skin getting too tanned may point to internalized racism, which is widespread in Mexico (Moreno Figueroa 2013). However, Eugenia was proud when the critically acclaimed Mexican film Roma (2018) focused on the character of a maid played by the actress Yalitza Aparicio, who has since been hailed as one of Mexico's most famous representatives of Indigenous beauty. Therefore, Eugenia's beauty regime seems to be driven not by a personal distaste for an Indigenous aesthetic but rather seems to be primarily an effort to leave a positive impression in a society where white tastes are culturally hegemonic. This “good karma,” the positive impression that Eugenia leaves through gifts and an attractive appearance in turn acts as a security strategy at the same time as it reproduces colonialist androcentric and heterosexist norms, as it may decrease the likelihood of receiving hurtful remarks while increasing the likelihood of receiving favors from white employers and others. Once again, we can observe the ambivalence that characterizes vernacular security practices at the margins of the margins.
Regarding her vulnerability to intimate violence, Eugenia again does not leave things to chance, but she is cautious. She has taken self-defense lessons and installed security cameras at her house. When online dating, she does not give her address to strangers. She says that she was more trusting when she was younger, but now she observes people's behavior closely and how they present themselves: “some people they can say one thing, but their actions (are) different [. . .], so you can't really trust.”
Notably, seeking respect is a notion that is also very important to men's security strategies among working-class Latinos (Bourgois 1997). Therefore, Eugenia's security strategies should not be regarded as universal but as marked by race and class. The importance of these affiliations will also become apparent in the discussion of our next case study.
Cleaning as Performance: Looking Back at the White Gaze
Cleaning services, like other care work in San Diego, is often provided by Mexican-American women, which has given rise to the stereotype that all women who are read as Latina and Brown in wealthy white majority areas are domestic workers. As the La Jolla-based artist Alejandra puts it, “Do I have to become a cleaning lady to be, you know, acceptable within a stereotype? That is how surveillance, social surveillance functions here.” Thus, state surveillance and citizens’ vigilance prompted Alejandra's personal watchfulness against being stereotyped while also developing an art performance as a long-term security strategy toward shifting perceptions around migrantized borderland women's work. She explains that when a migrantized person has an accent, white Anglo-Americans are quick to make assumptions about that person's work and where they live, such as being a cleaning lady from across the border. That has consequences for when and where people are socially accepted to exist, and thus affects their sense of security. “I have a 28-year-old son. Occasionally he comes here and it's insulting. [. . .] People ask him ‘Do you live here?’” Here we can observe how security strategies at the margins of the state produce ambivalent (in)visibilities at the margins of the margins. Alejandra interprets the notion that some people belong only temporarily but should be otherwise invisible as a form of structural racism, or white upper- and middle-class vigilance:
The way that [housekeepers] access [La Jolla] is through the bus [. . . or] one brings in five in the car. [. . .] When (rich people) see a car that is just kind of, like, run down or broken, they immediately raise their eyebrows. So, the stereotype, they are always surveilling. And the same way with men for service, for maintenance. You know, gardeners or people that work in the restaurant industry – the same treatment. Their cars, their Brown bodies [. . .]. As long as they are working it's okay, but once they leave, they shouldn't exist. You know they don't stay. Everybody leaves.
Alejandra herself has been mistaken for the nanny of the blonde daughter she has with her Anglo-American second husband. Similarly, as an art teacher, children said to her, “You sound like my nanny.” She did in fact briefly work as a nanny when she was a young unauthorized immigrant. For her, the problem lies in racist stereotyping. “I have been observed, all because of my skin color. It's all about skin color.”
Moving to the United States was a security strategy because it allowed her to get away from her abusive ex-husband, generalized misogyny, and political violence in Mexico. Alejandra did have a good job as a professor in Mexico and therefore did not have to move for economic reasons. There were not only benefits to moving. “Mexico was more about classism. Here it's racism. [. . .] Patriarchy on both ways, right, in both countries.” She is aware that having had access to education, including graduate school in San Diego, is a privilege. Yet much like Eugenia, Alejandra believes that she will always be perceived as and feel like an immigrant in the United States, even though she is a US citizen now.
Alejandra's performance art calls white surveillance and vigilance into question by disrupting people's habits of sight, destabilizing the stereotype of the Mexican-American cleaning lady. When Juana is cleaning at an art gallery, the usual assumptions no longer apply. She describes this practice as “trying to activate the conscious[ness] of people.” Yet achieving this effect requires watchfulness. “I have to be careful because otherwise I become a spectacle, right. And that's not how it works.” On the contrary, Alejandra's work has an intimate quality, as it is a creative security strategy in response to her personal experiences of racism.
To prepare for her performance as “Juana” the cleaning lady, Alejandra learned how to position her body and how to do the tasks, and she spoke with many housekeepers to learn about their experiences. Alejandra was raised in a “super traditional” humble household, where she was taught how to be a good housewife. “That's why Juana can clean so well, right. Cause I was raised to be that woman.” As Juana, Alejandra seeks to disrupt the normalized image of Mexican-American women as cleaners who are as such positioned at the bottom of the social hierarchy. She confronts clients with their hierarchical and stereotypical perception of what kind of people should be doing what kind of work:
Every time people know, that it's not a cleaning lady, it's me, it's very uncomfortable. They think of labor, they think about women, and gender, you know, like working hard. How uncomfortable it is for them to know that someone is scrubbing their toilets, or, like, cleaning whatever. . . . And it's an exercise of consciousness, right. Like ‘Oh I should be doing this, instead of you or somebody else doing it.’ I think that this country, in many ways, this culture has become lazy, right. White people are like at the top and then everybody else goes and cleans your shit.
Often, white people respond to the cleaning performance by projecting their moral discomfort, or guilt—the sense that “I should be doing this, instead of you”—on Alejandra. Some have accused her of offending or misrepresenting housekeepers. One white Latino professor even suggested that she had been producing “poverty porn.” She insists, “I talk to [housekeeping professionals], I tell them about what I do, I do it with respect and love and care.” The care Alejandra puts into developing her performance is a security strategy against unjust attacks from white people who are uncomfortable with the way she breaks with class and racialized forms of hierarchy, which in turn represents a long-term security strategy against structures of oppression. Her performance also points to the creative potential of individuals at the margins of the margins to establish security for their own bodies and of others. Recently, she has shown a housekeeper at her work photographs of the performance, without issues. “I haven't yet known why white people think that I'm making fun of them.”
Especially at first, it was challenging to find spaces for the performance as a cleaning lady. One of the first people to support her artistic vision was an art museum director for whom Alejandra was working as a receptionist:
And after [. . .] three, four months he came to me and said, “You know, I'm so sorry but it hasn't been possible.” Obviously, no one wanted [to host the performance] because they felt uncomfortable. [. . .] They were gonna be on the other side, they were gonna be “exploited” finally, right. This idea of, like, that's what they do. And the answer that he got was, “Oh no, we don't want that because our staff might be offended.” [. . .] His wife ended up hiring [Juana]. [. . .] The performance lasted for three, four hours. [. . .] It's just interesting how the dynamics were. [. . .] Having someone cleaning for you and you know that it's not a cleaning lady, it is an artist that is doing that job, sooner or later after the second hour, something is gonna trigger, something is going to happen.
As a performing artist, Alejandra therefore keenly observes those who are watching her. She holds up a mirror to “the Disney concept” of cleaning that she observes in California—the illusion that all is well with the existing social hierarchies and the exploitation of Mexican-American women:
I remember coming here as a child and seeing that everybody was just happy and smiley. No, that's a paid smile. Someone is paying them to smile and be nice.
[. . .]
I see my practice as an artist being a very important chapter in my life to empower me with what I only felt when I was [. . .] having conversations with my racist mother-in-law. So, like, “Oh, it was not just a feeling.’” She was racist and I was mistreated. And I wish I could go back and, you know, give her a [piece] of my mind. [. . .] By being kind and nice, I was kind of [. . .] avoiding confrontation. [. . .] No one told me I had to learn that I had to stand up for myself and say, “No, that is wrong, and you are racist, and that's very close to a crime.”
Some of her experiences of racism were more subtle and all the more insidious: “When I was waiting for my kids outside of the school and talking to white ladies [. . .] and a third one comes to the conversation and they literally close with their bodies the conversation and I'm out. That happened so many times. [. . .] I wanted to say ‘What was that? What do you think you just did?’”
In summary, Alejandra's performances as Juana appear to function as a delayed response to the insecurity she has experienced. They can be regarded as a security strategy to the extent that they empowered her to articulate, and speak out against, past and present experiences of discrimination. Her performances may also contribute to a broader cultural shift in attitudes toward borderland women and may thus represent a long-term security strategy for other women as well. Thinking of herself as a “strong woman and a strong mother,” she uses her voice as an artist to also empower other racialized and migrantized women. “I think that probably it's a combination of age, knowledge, being lucky, being recognized, [. . .]. And I was, like, “Oh, how do I make it better?’ [. . .] Like, ‘Oh, I'm…this is not about only me.’ It's about what I can do for [. . .] other women.” Thus, by taking care of herself, Alejandra also exercises feminist care for others.
Watching out for racialized injustice is crucial to safeguarding the lives and wellbeing of disadvantaged individuals. In this vein, Alejandra's performances have opened up opportunities for other migrantized people to share about their experiences:
At the end of one performance, [. . .] the guard talked to Juana and he just disclosed how difficult it was for him to be undocumented [. . .]. So, how difficult it was going to be for his kids to be deported, if they had never lived in Latinoamérica. And after that it was hard for me as an artist to keep the character, and I just began crying, you know like nonstop, because it's hard. It's hard to hear that it's true [. . .]. It is happening everywhere.”
She highlights the importance of making injustices visible in the wider society, not to mimic these but as a way to reconfigure existing relations of power and to establish security at the margins. Her artistic work goes beyond words and brings the unspoken to the fore through the performative power of her artwork. She concludes that, “We talk in general about things that make us feel comfortable and safe. But the moment that we feel unsafe, we stop. That's what I think my performance is all about.”
The Coloniality of Cleaning: Feminine Security and Care in the Borderlands
Both Alejandra's and Eugenia's experiences are shaped by the meaning that white middle-class San Diegans attach to the border and to having been born on the other side of it. The prejudice and bias that Alejandra and Eugenia face as Mexican-American women feeds on Anglo-Americans’ poorly informed perceptions of Tijuana. This becomes evident in a conversation Alejandra had with one of her neighbors: “She was just like, [. . .] ‘How's Tijuana? It must be awful!’ [. . .] It's just a myth that [. . .] was created by the news so people won't cross the border and the economy stays here, rather than across the border. It's all a financial, economical decision. And it's, like, ridiculous. [. . .] But it's always, you know, looking south, it's unsafe.”
When Alejandra hears Anglo-Americans stereotype Tijuana as a dangerous and unpleasant place, it upsets her, but instead of getting defensive, she has learned to change the conversation by confronting people with their myopic and hypocritical perception of security issues. “I just, like, focus more on what happens here and then people keep quiet.” When Anglo-Americans speak of drug dealers in Tijuana, she agrees that they exist but also points out that there are mass murderers in the United States. “And they're white.”
Alejandra's anecdote highlights that the white Anglo-American perspective is dominant in defining border security issues on the media and in political debates as well as many casual conversations among ordinary Americans. However, Alejandra challenges the white gaze and its negative perception of Tijuana by looking and talking back, thereby drawing attention to asymmetries in security narratives. While certain middle-class white people may feel unsafe in Tijuana, many Latinos and Latinas feel threatened by white supremacist terror on the US side of the border. For example, the large Mexican-American community of San Ysidro, the southern-most neighborhood of San Diego County, remains traumatized by the 1984 McDonalds massacre in which a white gunman shot 40 mostly Mexican and Mexican-American people, of whom 21 were killed (Hernández 2018).
Eugenia also seeks to redefine how she and, by extension, other Mexican-American women, are perceived by Anglo-Americans without directly challenging their perception of Tijuana and those living south of the border. Returning to the scene described by Eugenia at the start of this article, being lured to a stranger's house under the false pretense of hiring her for cleaning when he really turned out to want sex was a frightening experience. Yet although she was scared, Eugenia told the man firmly, “My website says clearly ‘housekeeping,’ and I think you've been very disrespectful, you make me driv(e) all the way here [. . .]. If you don't need my cleaning service, I'm not a sex service, you [. . .] have to pay me, and I have to leave right now or [I] will call the police.” By asserting herself in this way, Eugenia not only established boundaries for her own safety. She also challenged the white male gaze that homogenized all Mexican-Americans as being from Tijuana, and all women from Tijuana as potentially being sexually disposable. By looking and talking back, she drew attention to her false client's dirty and unsafe behavior, and by extension, to the visceral dangers awaiting women of Mexican origin north of the border.
The Anglo-American white gaze that constructs Tijuana as a dangerous place and Mexican women as sexually disposable is a feature of ongoing coloniality in the borderlands. Following María Lugones (2007), European colonizers imposed their binary and patriarchal concepts of gender and sexuality on Indigenous populations as well as introducing a hierarchical system of racial categories. She argues that in today's neoliberal world, colonial tropes of Indigenous women's Otherness and inferiority are kept alive as they continue to serve the economic and political interests of those in power. Specifically, neoliberalism creates pressure for women to enter the labor market, which fosters a class-based labor division where white women employ Women of Color to do their housework, often under exploitative conditions (Fraser 2022; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001). Accordingly, white middle-class women are complicit in the feminization and racialization of cleaning and other kinds of housework from which they stand to benefit (Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2010). While white women's economic empowerment often depends on the domestic labor of Women of Color and has led to a disruption of Euro-American gender relations (Illouz 2019), white men turn to women south of the border for cheap sex (Luna 2020). Colonialist structures therefore perpetuate Women of Color's vulnerability to economic and sexual exploitation and violence.
Despite their shared experiences of discrimination, with respect to their strategies of establishing security for themselves and others, what sets Eugenia and Alejandra apart is equally important as what they have in common. They are both racialized Mexican-American women living in the US-Mexico borderlands, yet their experiences and class affiliations differ considerably. Their ways of responding to racism and violence are shaped by their individual biographies.
Eugenia was subject to abuse in her own family and managed to escape the prison that her father built for her. She also clearly sets herself apart from her Mexican relatives’ racism, which leads them to discriminate against cleaning women. As her cleaning business gave her financial independence, it also provided her with a broader sense of security and orders her life—and to some extent, others’ lives. On the job, Eugenia further establishes security for herself by placing emphasis on respect and professionalism, in connection with an aestheticized body in terms of a confident appearance and perfect makeup.
By contrast, Alejandra is more concerned with addressing stereotypes and challenging pre-conceived (socio-spatial-temporal) categories of where people belong and should be (in)visible. She uses art as a means to draw attention to discrimination and cleaners’ humanity. Thus, she actively engages privileged Anglo-American audiences and Mexican-American workers alike, albeit to different effect.
Beyond these differences, in both Alejandra and Eugenia's cases, their vernacular notion of security at the margins means living free from discrimination and violence, while striving for freedom and respect. Rather than being stereotyped by the white (male) gaze, this means managing ambivalence by presenting themselves and being seen as complex people with divergent stories.
Clean Borders Need Women's Dirty Work: Security from the Margins of the Margins
The building of walls suggests the idea of a clean, simple border, keeping out the filth of, in Trump's infamous words, “shithole countries” (Vitali et al. 2018). In fact, the physical border cannot keep out the pollution flowing out the Tijuana River, nor can it fully control who gets to cross it. As an imaginary line, the border is a similarly precarious structure. White Anglo-American men's often naturalized, yet fragile sense of superiority and entitlement relies on relegating migrantized people to do their “dirty work” and particularly women to provide underpaid care work, such as cleaning services.
The coloniality of gender under neoliberalism has profound implications for Mexican-American women's security in the borderlands while simultaneously rendering the threats to their security and their strategies to produce security at the margins invisible, as security debates are dominated by the white male gaze in the United States and other contexts of coloniality. Marta-Laura Haynes (2023: 15) describes that, “In Brazil, women from favelas are essential service providers who are not to look and not to be seen,” while national security debates are saturated with images of male-on-male gang violence. However, these women challenge the dominant male gaze through an “alternative politics of visibility and legibility” that intervenes in “the economy of visuality that quite often misrepresent and disempower them” (ibid.).
In this article, we have centered the perspective of two ordinary women on security strategies in the US-Mexico borderlands. Alejandra's performance art in San Diego looks back at Anglo-Americans public as a security strategy with the aim of interrupting a dominant power dynamic. This practice highlights that marginality does not just restrain individuals but triggers creative and alternative ways of challenging hegemonic forces. By contrast, Eugenia's watchfulness in the face of the white male gaze is primarily directed at keeping herself safe by ensuring sovereignty over her body. Whether they are commenting on their own experiences or those of other Mexican-American women who are involved in cleaning as a kind of care work, certain similarities emerge. Living in the face of ongoing coloniality requires Mexican-American women and other vulnerable people to develop strategies of survival. As we have shown from a feminist decolonial perspective, watchfulness is one way of establishing security for oneself and others. While the two women at the center of this article are not feminist activists, they seek to draw attention to inequalities and experiences of discrimination as a way to establish boundaries of what constitutes acceptable treatment of cleaning professionals, while calling into question taken-for-granted gendered and racialized divisions.
Therefore, unlike previous research that has presented cleaning professionals as demurely or manipulatively downplaying hierarchical relationships (Romero 1992), the women in our study instead emphasized dimensions of difference in order to straightforwardly and assertively protect themselves and others. Our findings thus add further nuance to our understanding of migrantized women's lives with respect to working as cleaning professionals or being stereotyped as such in the US-Mexico borderlands.
Crucially, our research contributes to studies of vigilance and security by revealing strategies of marginalized actors who are often overlooked. We have shown that in their understanding, security is linked to an anti-discrimination struggle for equity, and their watchfulness includes self-work and community care that is rarely commented on, but key to realizing a more just future. In the upshot, feminist vigilance is not a reactive practice of special attention, but paves the way for decolonization, empowerment, and freedom.
Acknowledgments
This research was enabled by the Collaborative Research Center 1369 “Cultures of Vigilance” at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), and additional funding from the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt. We also thank the University of California San Diego's Anthropology department for hosting Catherine Whittaker as a visiting researcher as well as the anonymous reviewers, Erella Grassiani and the Conflict and Society editorial team, and the editors of this Special Issue, Philipp Naucke and Ernst Halbmeyer. Your advice was invaluable for revising this text.
Notes
All names changed for privacy.
This article was supported by the Collaborative Research Center 1369 on “Cultures of Vigilance” at the LMU Munich, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, 2019-2027), where the authors collaborated on a project investigating Chicanx Watchfulness (cf. Whittaker et al. 2023), led by Eveline Dürr as PI. Catherine Whittaker collected the ethnographic material for this article and is the lead author of this article, while Eveline Dürr contributed to the analysis and the writing.
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