Reflections on the Value of Malini Sur’s Jungle Passports (2021)
Josiah Heyman
Borderlines begins its second book forum, titled “Jungle Passports,” with a discussion on borderlands, mobility, and citizenship by different scholars. This essay is the first part of the book forum which engages with the ideas within Malini Sur’s book: “Jungle Passports: Fences, Mobility, and Citizenship at the North-East India-Bangladesh Border.”
India’s new border fence with Bangladesh under construction in the states of Meghalaya and Assam, North-east India. Photo courtesy: Malini Sur.
I write from a university on the U.S. side of the U.S.-Mexico border. For me, as for readers all over the world, there are valuable ideas and orientations in Jungle Passports. I think it likely that the dominant mental image of borders are rigid physical barriers against the protean human urge to move. There is considerable truth in this. This idea, however, renders borders essentially prohibitive, devices that aim to stop things from happening (migrating, shopping, socializing). But Sur, along with myself and other border scholars, find that borders are generative; beyond obstructing and prohibiting, they motivate important new movements and lifeways, or inflect already occurring peoples and processes.
The jungle passports of the title, for example, are the skills and activities of small-scale smuggler-traders, bringing items such as clothing discarded by export garment plants in Bangladesh to markets in India. This business is dominated by Garo Christian women, who fit poorly inside boundaries of any kind (religious, ethnic, gender). These traders carry goods, and also visit their relatives, using remote and poorly guarded paths across a lengthy and complex riverine border—even after Indian militarization of major crossing zones. While the substrate of the jungle passports—the matrilineal Garo kinship, remote passage ways, market sites in the back country—existed before the imposition of a border between India and East Pakistan (later Bangladesh), the profit to be realized by smuggling a valued good past a real but also ineffective barrier engenders a way of life at the border. People thus come to live near the border as a result of direct and indirect involvement in consumer-goods smuggling. The equivalent occurs in Mexico, called fayuca. The metaphor of jungle passports as a way to bypass or defy authority likewise was created within border life (viz “passports”). Borders thus give rise to new or reworked ways of life, social groups, geographies, and so forth (for a rich account from Mexico, see Velasco Ortiz and Contreras Montellano 2011).
This is not to romanticize the generative qualities of borders. While small-scale smuggling of discarded export garments might seem brave and autonomous in its defiance of India’s regulation of its border with Bangladesh, not all phenomena generated by borders are so benign. In my view, the U.S.-Mexico border generates a distinctive synthesis of opportunities (money, business, employment, escape from gender and sexuality oppression, etc.) with suffering (export factory discipline and exploitation, gun, sex, and drug trafficking, corrupt political machines, criminal organization operations, militarized enforcement agencies, concentrated pollution, etc.). While Jungle Passports is in a different setting (more rural and remote, export assembly plants concentrated in Dhaka not at the border [but still drawing in borderlanders], etc.), there are some suggestions of related processes.
One of the fascinating ethnographic passages in Jungle Passports concerns “fang-fung,” which Sur characterizes as denoting “at once both duplicity and dependency…their semantic union is ascribed to muscle-flexing men and their seemingly devious actions and dispositions at the border. The expression fang-fung is rooted in masculine and moral debates about profits, sustenance, and patronage in riverine regions where land and male employment cannot be taken for granted.” Sur brings out this concept in the case of cattle smuggling from India to Bangladesh. Export of cattle for meat and leather is limited by India and regulated by Bangladesh, but in unauthorized reality is highly lucrative. There are various sizes and numbers of animals but the top of the market is controlled by smugglers protected by political bosses and strong arms. The U.S.-Mexico border, and I think many other borders, lend themselves to this nexus of political boss-ism, violence, masculinity (but some women are also involved), and smuggling. At this border, it is seen in a variety of illegal commerce, but notably the trade of U.S. guns into Mexico and illegalized drugs into the United States, with unaccountable, often physical money moving in both directions. But key is its relationship to political arrangements.
One would not want to attribute this political use of and cover for illegality and violence only to borders—they occur across key sites in national interiors—but there are structural reasons why borders concentrate these arrangements. Let’s say one side of the border provides legality or de facto police toleration for the organizing and assembling of the smuggled people or commodities (e.g., the United States for guns and munitions). Sometimes this occurs because the business on one side has political power and is legal (U.S. guns), but it also occurs despite formal illegality (e.g., psychotropic drugs in Mexico) in situations in which political bosses gain income, votes, and access to violent force from the illegal activity. Important Mexican work has been done on the linkage of criminals to political rule in border states.
Then, smuggling organizations gain enormous increments of value from the act of transferring illegal goods across an enforced border (often a corrupt and porous border). Access to this border step in the business is immensely profitable, so it becomes the object of violent rivalry for territorial control of areas to assemble goods and pass them, and relatedly the patronage of politicians and police officials. On the Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexico line, these territorially defined social-political arrangements are called the plaza. The U.S. side of the border is less overtly violent or tolerant of open criminality, so the business model shifts in the United States to a mix of quiet (but pervasive) corruption and washing of criminal revenues inside apparently legitimate businesses, real estate, etc. Border officials on both sides then control and profiteer (e.g., for the less expected, but important U.S. side corruption, see Heyman and Campbell 2007, Jancsics 2021).
These illegalities and patterns of violence are consumed and used, in a one-dimensional way, to justify the exclusionary, militarized, and “security threat” view of borders. Because they are discursively and politically used in that problematic way, we might as critical scholars tend to avoid speaking in these terms and of these subjects. But that would miss a great concern of borderlanders. Mexican borderland citizens and scholars are very interested in understanding and changing the nexus of criminality and violence on their northern border (for example, see Monárrez Fragoso et al. 2010, Sandoval Hernández 2018). For several years around 2010 Ciudad Juárez, the second largest Mexican border city, was more dangerous than wartime Baghdad, and currently Tijuana, the largest one, has the second highest homicide rate of all major world cities. So our challenge is how to admit, analyze, and help change these situations while not reinforcing the repressive framework.
One point worth making is how political boss rule, whether in the form of party politics or single party authoritarianism, creates and feeds off these violent and criminal arrangements. The other is that prohibitionist policies, without addressing deeper causes of phenomena, simply make money and transfer power to criminal networks and to the politicians who provide them cover, at horrifying human cost (for the U.S.-Mexico drug case, see Boullosa and Wallace 2015; Payan, Staudt, and Kruszewski 2013).
The securitized discourse and policy around borders focuses on assigning people to definite bounded territories, with outsiders as security threats. The notable exceptions are the wealthy and powerful, and some functional personnel of global capitalism, whose privilege sometimes bypasses these limitations. This is supposedly demonstrated through various documents of identity, territorial presence, voting rights, work rights, public resource rights, and so forth. The ideal—for it is often bent, compromised, or defied—is that each person has a known, documented identity that gives rights to a specific geographic space. This social-political concept, which is still expanding in the contemporary world, explains much of the fear, loathing, and coercive force of contemporary borders. The repressive and messy effort to rectify the world to fit this (really impossible and perhaps deeply wrong) ideal is repeated across Jungle Passports. Sur speaks of Garo who move back and forth across the river, later the border, according to some mix of economic opportunities and matrilateral residence; Bangladeshi Muslim men who work as unauthorized migrants in Assam and Meghalaya; and Bengali Hindus who were resettled to Assam, but in the subnational version of this territorialism, as Bengalis are still unwelcome there. The participants have limited literacy, the records are non-existent or chaotic, the authorities are motivated by political symbolism and bureaucratic theater, and people are moving, maneuvering, dissembling, reinventing, slanting, and so forth, on all sides. Indeed, the idea that people have clear identities associated with definite bounded places flies in the face of the processuality and relationality of human life —not least the generative quality of borders and the slippery daily movement across them.
A perspective “from below” on borders, one that attends to the lives of borderlanders, and not just a political vision from a distance—seeing borders as a site of threat, needing control, or conversely as a site of agency-less, innocent victims of state repression—must attend to these generative geographies, ways of life, and forms of expression. Despite thoughtful, observant, respectful accounts like Jungle Passports, “border” is produced and consumed in reductive ways, even in apparently serious academic work: the word “border” simply as political stance. And I point the finger at the left as much as the right. This reduction is disrespectful to borderlanders. I write this with some passion—please forgive me—for while a senior white man living in the global north (barely), I intentionally moved to and have taught at a working-class university in the U.S. borderlands with Mexico. The U.S. borderlands are overwhelmingly non-white, of Mexican origin, one of the poorest regions of the country; and the Mexican northern borderlands are poorer and tougher yet, vast industrial sprawls serving the north with manufactures, servants, and drugs. Thoughtful accounts of lived experiences of borderlanders like Jungle Passports, then, crucially resist the dehumanization, the political iconization, of borders.
Josiah Heyman is Professor of Anthropology, Endowed Professor of Border Trade Issues, and Director of UTEP’s Center for Inter-American and Border Studies. He is the Director of the M.A. program in Latin American and Border Studies. He is the author of two books - Life and Labor on the Border: Working People of Northeastern Sonora, Mexico 1886-1986 and Finding a Moral Heart for U.S. Immigration Policy: An Anthropological Perspective, and editor of Paper Trails: Migrants, Documents, and Legal Insecurity, The U.S.-Mexico Transborder Region: Cultural Dynamics and Historical Interactions, and States and Illegal Practices. His current work addresses migration and human rights at the Mexico-United States border and water sustainability in the binational Paso del Norte region.
Commissioned by: Antara Chakrabarti and Purbasha Das, Editorial Assistance: Tara Giangrande