Conflicting visibilities: Police and politics among border migrants in Chile

Abstract

The inhabitants of the squatted settlements in the border city of Arica, mostly indigenous migrants from the Peruvian–Bolivian highlands, feel the effects of the racialized geography of northern Chile through social discrimination, economic exploitation and deprivation of political rights. In these settlements, their migrant residents make palpable the pervasive tension between a mode of visibility that I analyse in terms of a ‘politics of presence’ and another kind of visibility that is created by the state’s ‘legibility’ techniques. Three aspects come together in this process of conflicting visibilities: (1) the reciprocal influence between a borderland and its police order; (2) the relationship between biopower and the (in)visibility dynamic of migrant lives; and (3) the generative relationship between a redefinition of security and altered citizen practices. Through an analysis of these sets of relationships, the article provides a richer understanding of how, in the struggle between the political logic of equality and the police logic of domination, border migrants forge cunning and rebellious political subjectivities that challenge the border regime in which they find themselves by questioning both the basis on which rights are defined and the boundaries of citizenship.