The periphery within: Racial banishment in the Florida suburbs

Keywords: racialization, migration, housing, labor, suburbs
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

In South Miami-Dade County, Florida, migrant agricultural workers often live in informal housing built behind mortgaged suburban ranch homes. Unregulated and unpermitted, these trailers, efficiencies, sheds, and auto-constructed structures do not have formal addresses. Without an address, migrant tenants cannot enroll children in school, comply with asylum requirements, contest unjust evictions, or receive medical care and disaster aid. A form of racial banishment (Roy 2019) through liminal incorporation (Ghertner 2023), address-less-ness denies primarily Indigenous Maya migrants access a formal relationship to property and so to public goods while rendering them available for exploitative agricultural labor. This paper develops the analytic of the “periphery within:” a form of spatial containment that operates within the U.S. suburb to produce cascading social and political foreclosures for migrant tenants. Studies of displacement and exclusion often track the spatialization of racialized exclusion by zip code, neighborhood, or block. Informal and unregulated housing behind suburban homes requires us to think about the spatialization of racial banishment at a more intimate scale: by plot, by structure, by unit. The “periphery within” asks a Southern question of the American suburb (Bhan 2019) and analyzes a genre of dispossession that is neither eviction nor displacement but the private and parceled proliferation of the labor camp.