In 1975, Michel Foucault’s resonate treatise Discipline and Punish conceptualized the “carceral archipelago,” positing a pioneering theorization of how social control is achieved by the state’s projection of carceral power, conveyed via a “series of institutions well beyond the frontiers of criminal law,” called the “carceral continuum,” whereby the “technique” of the penitentiary is “transported” from the “penal institution” to the “entire social body.” Foucault’s archipelago was not merely the original philosophical framing of what we would come to call the material “carceral state” (the penal state), but also foregrounded the contemplation of the often ignored (but quite real) consequent human condition created by the projection of state power: the carceral state of being. The sexualized plight of female migrant workers in California, like that of imprisoned women, reveals the traumatic carceral state of being that the state’s projection of carceral power imposes upon vulnerable women.
More than a nuanced way of looking at state power, this reorientation of the “carceral state” requires one to move beyond the mere materiality of the organs of the penal state (prison, parole, and the tentacles of the prison industrial complex), and participate in a broader paradigmatic shift of focus that looks not just to the methods and forms by which Foucault’s continuum operates to convey carceral power, but to the human conditions people contend with when state power is projected into the whole of society, beyond the penal state, where it imposes pressures of social control upon one’s state of being. Looking at consequences centers the struggle testimony of those most impacted by state power, and elevates the primary source witness accounts of those brave enough to attest to the abusive conditions state power creates.
In California, the same white supremacist legislative state power architecture that created the exploitive economic conditions that made ripe the operation of the state’s first prison using convict labor, also fashioned the proto-genocidal conditions that gave rise to the plantation-like agricultural farm worker system that currently renders women working in the fields — including those toiling in food processing plants, and cleaning homes in domestic worker roles — vulnerable to sexual violence perpetrated by their employers, where low wages, scarce works hours, affordable housing, reliable transportation, and urgent child care hang in the balance. Ironically, Mexican immigrants and Indigenous people are working fields and cleaning homes situated on land originally owned by Mexican and Native people who lived in California before their land became expropriated by the state. Via the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the Land Act of 1851, and the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, California effectively dispossessed Mexican and Native landowners of their claims to all of the land they held at the conclusion of the Mexican-American war, confiscated their generational wealth, and plunged non-white people into generational poverty.
It can be quite easy to assume that the Mexican and Native women bent over in the field, packing in the warehouse, cleaning, or walking the track on a prison yard all come from meager beginnings, were always poor, or squandered the same opportunity “everybody is born with.” In fact, because California does not teach its own state history in a manner that includes the uncomfortable truths about the racialized confiscatory tactics of state power deployed against the original inhabitants of the California territory before it officially became a state, too few people have the requisite knowledge base with which to historicize the architecture that undergirds the state’s economic design of inequality and subjugation.
Though “ethnic studies” has become a state-mandated course of study for California’s high school students, and is a degree requirement for California State University (CSU) graduates, the state doesn’t teach the inconvenient truths that reveal its racist formation history. Like the erasure of Critical Race Theory from classrooms, so too has California scrubbed its anti-Mexican and anti-Native dirty hands clean from the information conveyed to learners. In neither the Adult Basic Education classes that comprise the compulsory high school curriculum taught inside California’s prisons, nor the Ethnic Studies college courses offered within the general education degree ladder one climbs en route to a CSU degree, are these inconvenient truths presented. There is a censorship afoot that sanitizes California’s white supremist statecraft.
By not envisioning the carceral state as a state of being, the tolls of state power are never framed as humanized primary source testimony. By not teaching the accurate history of early California’s racialized anti-Mexican, and anti-Native epoch, the state propagandizes a false history that ignores the accurate stature of those who are now sequestered by reservations, borders, and poverty. Talks of reparation might need to encompass more than just what the Fugitive Slave Act stole. By telling the whole historical truth about what Mexican and Native people had taken from them, and examining the carceral state as a state of being, California’s students — be they sitting in prison, or one of the state’s underperforming public schools — might arrive at a more complete understanding of, and appreciation for those women working and living in spaces that make them vulnerable to sexualized violence.
Uplifting the dignity of the marginalized requires the use of a humanizing lens that brings their experience into critical examination. California owes its Mexican and Indigenous women a proper ethnograph and protection from state harm.
