Relational Care as an Antidote to Social Death

Keywords: Relational care, social death, migration, Indigenous epistemologies, racial capitalism
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

This paper reveals that practices of relational care (rooted in Indigenous ways of being & knowing) as an intergenerational and transborder practice strengthens solidarity and kinship. As such, relational care serve as antidote to social death – described as the permanent condition the undocumented are forced to inhabit due the criminalization of their presence via the immigration law (Cacho 2012). The city of Pasco Washington enacts what might be described as social death via police violence, criminalization, and intimidation. However, my community and participants (mostly undocumented Mexican immigrants) see Pasco as a tranquil and peaceful place; as a place of family. Indeed, everyday practices of relational care - including convivencia, mourning, ceremony, and celebrations – in Pasco and across borders, strengthen community members’ sense of wholeness, happiness, and thus of social life. As such, here I want to think about how methods of relational care actually challenges the idea of social death; and to think instead about re-articulating the all encompassing idea of social death, into legal death, or a term that is more in relation with the law and what the law controls.