Archival absence: assembling the fragments of suburban detention

Keywords: militarism, U.S. empire, environmental justice, migrant detention, research methodology
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 4

Abstract

From prisons to detention camps to military bases, carceral infrastructures are sites of racialized spatial and environmental violence (Dillon 2015; Ybarra 2020). This paper draws on ongoing research on toxic and sonic harm at a detention camp for migrant and asylum-seeking children in Homestead, a suburb south of Miami, Florida. While in operation between 2016 and 2019, the Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Minors was the largest detention facility for children in the U.S. Built on former military land, it was directly adjacent to a toxic military Superfund site and to a military base runway. This paper reflects on a collaborative project to document—and contest—racialized environmental harm at the detention camp. Our research relied upon military, municipal, and federal archives, both publicly available and accessed via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. These archives offer us a partial and official history of the “spatial practices” that sustain and anticipate U.S. imperial war-making (Bou Akar 2018). Yet they are also filled with absences, omissions, and failures (Lutz 2019) that undermined our ability to make straightforward evidentiary claims about toxic and sonic exposures at the detention camp. Here, I draw on ongoing community-based research to argue that archival absence is also generative of knowledge and of political claims. While we often assume that geographic research for and with movements for racial and environmental justice is best leveraged to uncover evidence, this paper instead offers an example of methodological engagement with archival absence.