On Detention Landscapes: A Countertopography of Interior Borders in Spain and the US

Abstract

In this paper, I document two sites of immigration detention: the Northwest Detention Center (NWDC) in Tacoma, WA, U.S.; and el Centro de Internamiento de Extranjeros - Aluche (CIE-Aluche) in Madrid, Spain. Both are urban detention centers that house recent border crossers alongside long-term residents with deportation orders. Both were opened in 2005 to very little public outcry and are now highly contested. However, these two sites are shaped by very different historical, political, and economic processes. El CIE-Aluche is sited in the only remaining building of la Carcel de Carabanchel, a large prison complex originally built with the forced labor of Franco’s political prisoners just after the Spanish Civil War. Meanwhile, the grounds of the NWDC housed a meat-packing facility for a century, and today stores mounds of contaminated soil from the neighboring property, formerly a coal gasification plant. I engage with these landscapes visually and in writing to create what Cindi Katz calls a countertopography of migrant detention and interior bordering. The spaces I document are both potent, powerful, evocative. So too are the alliances that have formed to contest them: these address the specific histories and politics of the sites in question. Thus, this talk not only reflects the geographic divergences and convergences of the sites, but of the struggles that have unfolded in each.